Hope y’all aren’t sick of the topic of food preservation–it’s really the going concern around here right now. We just finished up a busy night of putting up produce. We pickled some beets, froze some green beans and made some pesto.
The green beans, which we’ve been eating for days, are busting out of the garden. It definitely would have been smart to do some succession planting–say, instead of putting in three rows all at once, wait a week between rows. Anyway, we picked more than seven pounds of beans yesterday, which equals one pretty full shopping bag. A proper "mess of beans," as they say, and way more than we can eat in one sitting.
In order to freeze new stuff, we had to clean out the freezer and make some room. Thus we found ourselves in the very silly position of discarding old frozen green beans (some from 2010, others from 2009!) to make way for new frozen green beans. It seems we’ve done a terrible job of using this particular resource. I hate wasting food, especially when it involves my own time and labor.
We found lots of other interesting goodies in there too–chicken backs, sweet potato bread, roasted pumpkin…And we vowed not to waste stuff in the future. We’re going to make a list of everything that’s in there and tack it to the fridge, so we can more easily keep all that food in mind as we plan meals.
Of course, the green beans are so delicious fresh, no preservation method can really do them justice. I’ve decided that instead of a freezer or a canner, what we really need is a time machine, so we can just send them into the future as is.
Anyone else putting food by these days?