Pesto

Back a couple of months ago, as summer was winding down, I cleared my garden of basil. We had a pretty large crop this year, and the best way I have found to store it is to make pesto, and freeze it. I make big batches, and freeze portions in ice cube trays. That way, when it is the middle of winter (although today is technically the first day of winter) and you are being lazy, you can just boil up some noodles, pop in a few of the pesto cubes and you have dinner. Go me for thinking ahead! For this particular dinner, I added a little extra by sauteing some onions and mushrooms to add to the mix. It was good stuff, and the baby LOVED it.

Puttin' up

Over the last few weekends, K and I have been working on puttin' up what is left in our garden. This was our first attempt at a garden and it worked better than we had planned. Here is what it looked like in early July:
We have already eaten or given away a lot of what is here, and the squirrels helped themselves to more than we would have liked. But now that it is fall, we were still left with a lot of tomatoes, carrots, and kholrabi.

As I showed in an earlier post, I canned a lot of the tomatoes, but after a few weeks, I had another batch. We picked all that were even close to ready, and decided to start with carrots.
It's hard to tell, but that is a lot of carrots. Our sink is very deep. I had to peel and dice all of the carrots, which took FOREVER. We put the bowl on our scale after I had done this and it was over 14 lbs!! I blanched the carrots in water for a couple of minutes, spun them dry and put them into freezer bags.

As for the tomatoes, we decided to try something besides canning this time. K helped me out with this. We (mostly he) prepared the tomatoes and buzzed them into sauce in the food processor, and put that mix right into the freezer bags. No cooking or anything. I am not sure how well this will preserve them, but I guess we will find out once we start trying to use it in sauces later this winter! After everything was done, we ended up with 9 quart bags of carrots, and 6 of tomato sauce.

The last thing to take care of was the kholrabi. If you don't know what kholrabi is, its pretty much broccoli without the tree part. You use it the same way, and it tastes the same. K was in charge of doing the peeling this time, and then I diced em all up into bite sized chunks. I delt with these the same as the carrots, blanching, drying and into freezer bags. We didn't end up with quite as much kholrabi as we did carrots, but close.

Now our garden is empty, except for some winter spinach we planted late in the season, and we have a full freezer to help us during winter. Just in time too, because the first snow is falling as I type this!