Freezing Food Notes

There has been a lot of freezer and composte action this weekend.  Our family has evolved and grown these past few years that our food consumption has changed and grown as well.  Starting out married dinner for 2 people easy.  Then a  baby came baby food and food allergies hmmm.  Then baby turns into toddler and more babies follow with more food allergies and other nutrition education.  Babies turn into toddlers into older children into tweens (is that really a word I can't even use it I still like preteen) well now we are a family of 7 people.  Big and small we love to eat food and try recipes and prepare our food. 

I've mentioned before I'm the anti-canner.  If I can avoid canning I will but I love my  freezers the kitchen one and the bigger one in the basement.  While the family was growing when then older ones were babies I got into the habit of freezing baby food. Then I started freezing fruits we picked.  Last summer I began freezing very few vegetables just  a couple of bags that didn't last long.  This summer I went all out and went into a freezer frenzy collecting some of our favorite vegetables  for recipes, preparing the stations on the counter, trying to figure out an efficient process with some help around here.  My advice recruit whoever you can for chopping even for just a little while. 

I think my main motivation to freeze much more this year is because our family has evolved from having a busy crazy schedule, to decreasing our activity schedule, then making slow decisions to homeschool and now slowing it down a bit more.  Whatever our path may have been  or is now meals need to be made and it would be nice to have certain food items already handy in the freezer.  It takes the prep work out for later and makes it easier sometimes when trying a new recipe.  It's also nice when we can be more in touch with our food from the csa, farmer's market and picking.  We talk about the process and months later remember hopefully we will carry on year after year. 

During this whole process I made lots of notes in a notebook just for harvesting about planteing, how and what grew, what didn't work and what I wanted more or less of this summer.  Now there are notes in there about this freezing process for fruits and vegetables and yes I also took lots of pictures this weekend at every step when I remembered.  There was a comment floating around here that I took more pictures of food than the kids.  Yes true but temporary.

So from Friday till Sunday we froze:

tomatoes

leeks

scallions

beans

corn

swiss chard

peaches

The last summer weekend was spent in the kitchen washing, dicing, boiling, freezing, running out to the composte. In the end it was worth knowing there will be summer vegetables in the freezer this fall/winter. The notebook and pictures is to document for future reference and make any needed adjustments and for the blog.  I know all the recipes and processes can be googled but this weeks posts will be a  Freezing Food Series  of what went on in my kitchen. So bear with me this week with the vegetables, instructions, pictures and repetition. 
Hope you will come on by leave a comment and if you have any suggestions or stories I'd love to read them.