Category: Freezing

One last blast about zucchini! Last week I had a full tray of zucchini and I was done experimenting with recipes. Time to pull out the food processor to shred and freeze the last big batch. My little hand-held shredder was fine for one or two zucchinis to make one recipe. Now I had a pile and the food processor could handle it quickly…it probably took longer to clean up the machine when I was done than it took to shred all the zucchinis!

I had more to choose from, but the two biggest zucchinis ended up being composted…the seeds were too big!

I first cut all the zucchini into smaller pieces.

The chunks had to fit into the hole at the top:

The food processor has a nice shredding blade.

It took only a few minutes to shred all the zucchini!

All done!

I scooped 2 cups of the shreds into each quart bag and flattened them out so they would stack in the freezer.

I now have 5 bags of shredded zucchini in the freezer ready for all those recipes I tried over the last month! Yay!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

You might think I’ve been sitting around this week after all the preparations for the Arts Festival last week! Haha! The garden produce waits for no one! When beans need to be picked…it needs to be NOW! With daytime temperatures this week of 95 degrees F. or more, I found myself out in the garden at 6 a.m.! It took a few days, an hour or so each day, to get them picked. Once the beans were in the refrigerator I spent time in front of the TV snapping them and getting them ready to freeze.

By the time I was ready to blanch and freeze them I had run out of room to store them in the refrigerator. That meant it was time!

First, they all needed to be snapped and any blemished beans were discarded. Because it hadn’t rained recently the beans were pretty clean. I guess even the slugs and bugs were not attracted to them…yet! Time to get them into the freezer.

This is my set up in front of my recliner in the living room. I can snap them and discard the ends in the smaller bowl right between my feet!

Next, I get my largest pan out and bring water to a boil, add the beans, bring it back to a boil and let them boil for 5 minutes.

Then I have a big bowl of water and ice ready and scoop all the beans into the cold water.

After a few minutes, the ice has melted and the beans are cool. I scoop them out with my hands into another bowl and fill quart zip bags with the beans. When I was finished with this batch, I had six one-quart bags filled with beans, ready for the freezer! They will be so good this winter.

It probably takes longer to pick the beans, snap them and get the pots ready than it does to actually blanch the beans and get them into the freezer. I think I’ll be doing another round soon as these first plants wind down. Luckily, we started two more rows of beans several weeks after the first planting so we should be able to eat fresh beans the rest of the summer! If you don’t grow them yourself, now is the time to look for them at the Farmer’s Markets. Enjoy!