God was good to us in our gardening efforts this year and we had an overabundence of peaches, tomatoes, lemons, and oranges. Well, there is only so much you can eat before you refuse to look at another peach yet you do not want to waste a single one. I found that if you skinned, sliced, and put lemon juice over the the peaches and froze them, they maintain their pretty color and work just fine for pies or peach crisp, later. I thought tomatoes would present more of a problem but found two solutions to our huge crop. One was to just slice and freeze them. I stored them in sealable freezer bags and made sure to let them freeze flat so I could stack them. I also cut a bunch of tomatoes into slices, drizzled them with lots of chopped garlic/olive oil and baked them for an hour or more in a 250 degree oven. I froze them in a plastic container and just use them to enhance tomato dishes, spaghetti sauce, etc. It was hard to pack them away as they tasted so good when they exited the oven.
Lemons were abundant this year, too. Besides a lemon tree branch than hangs over into our yard, we have a feisty lemon tree of our own. I read that you can wash whole lemons and freeze them! When you need some lemon juice, you just zap it in the microwave for a minute and the juice is more free flowing because the freezing breaks down the cells but doesn't change the taste.
Cranberries can't be raise in our garden, of course, but I do buy several extra bag during the holiday season in December and freeze them. I grew up enjoying cranberries with curried beef and rice and don't have to endure the canned stuff during the time before they show up in the market, again.
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