Wondering what to do with extra veggies as things start to get more abundant, and perhaps a bit too overwhelming to consume in just a week?
Now is a great time to fill your freezer/pantry for the winter. You might be surprised that most items in your CSA shares can actually be frozen, dried, fermented, pickled or canned well to be enjoyed later in the winter!
Freezing is my first go to when I find I have just a little too much to eat!
Broccoli, pole beans, tomatoes, corn, kale or chard, peppers - especially nice if you pre-roast them then you can just pull out a tasty container of roasted red-peppers in the middle winter to toss on a pizza or pasta or sandwich!, even chopped up herbs (with basil I especially love blending it up with oil or making a quick pesto I can pull out whenever I want a quick meal), and of course zucchini - I love to grate it up so I can pull it out for a fast zucchini loaf or cake!. All are great candidates for the freezer and such a treat to pull out and toss in a soup or stir-fry in the winter!
For the sake of simplicity, I don't usually bother to blanch or precook any of those veggies before freezing, and plus when you don't cook them ahead you save most the nutrients better!
Ute, who cooks many of our meals at the guest house at A Rocha, loves to make a big batch of frozen cucumber salad every season to pull out in spring so I attached that recipe below.
But if you don't have space for lots of frozen veggies, dehydrating is a great option. Don't have a dehydrator? You can just do it in your oven or toaster oven (here's a hack for how to do that)! Tomatoes and tomatillos are great dehydrated and saved for a snack or tossed into a soup or pasta later in the season. Beet, zucchini and kale chips are also tried and true favorites and there are many recipes for those online! And if you have just a few too many bunches of herbs they can be simply hung in bunches and used later as dried herbs!
And if you want to put a bit more time into your preserving - canning and pickling and fermenting are fantastic ways to save all your produce and enjoy it later. There are many many recipes out there for canning/fermenting and you could probably find a great recipe for just about everything we are growing (maybe with the exception of our tender greens :)).
We love to ferment cabbage, hot peppers and cucumbers at A Rocha, but you can ferment just about anything! One of my favorite resources for getting started in fermentation is the book Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz.
My favorite canning book right now is called Batch by Joel MacCharles and Dana Harrison. Last season I tried a recipe from them for curried pickled green beans and it was INCREDIBLE, a great one to try out right now as the green beans come on!
If you can't tell, I am pretty passionate about preservation and seasonal eating. So as I was writing this email I had to try and reign in my desire to fill it up with a gazillion recipes and ideas from my pantry. I hope it wasn't too overwhelming and that you might just give a few of these a shot! And if you have questions feel free to ask me, I love to talk cooking and veggies!
If you are thinking about doing some big preserving projects but need a bigger order of particular veggies for that please send me an email! We are starting to take orders for flats of tomatoes, and pickling cucumbers. But are also able to do large orders of other vegetables like green beans, beets, tomatillos or eggplant - just ask and we will see what we can do!
Cheers,
Farmer Carly
Ute's frozen cucumber salad:
