We are still planning our menus and doing our shopping
lists, but I haven’t had the time to post them.
Or rather, I’ve used the time when I should be posting my menu plans to
do other things! Lately those other
things include spending a large portion of my evening watering the vegetables
in my garden. This has been much more
important than normal due to the excessively hot weather we’ve been
experiencing here in Ireland! Last
summer my garden was well watered by rainfall.
This year I was a bit late getting the seeds that I wanted
to grow into the ground, but I’ve managed to use quite a bit of what I’ve grown
in our meals already. I’ve also frozen
some peas which were ready to eat at a future date. We are heading off for a week on Saturday and
if I had left them on the plants the pods would have gone leathery and the peas
inside would have been starchy and not nice to eat.
To freeze the peas I follow the instructions on the
growyourown.org website. I blanched them
in boiling water for 90 seconds before plunging them in ice cold water for a
further 90 seconds.
I then drained then and bagged them in Ziploc bags. The 'grow your own' website had a
recommendation for removing the air from bags before freezing them. It suggests inserting a straw into an opening
in the Ziploc bag and then closing the bag up to the straw. Once you do that you use the straw to suck
the air out of the bag can carefully close it.
I found that once I had removed the air if I continued sucking while
slowly pulling the straw out of the bag and keeping my fingers poised to close
the bag when the straw came out I was able to seal the bag without letting too
much air back into it. I hadn’t thought
of doing this last year when I was freezing some of my green beans and some of
them ended up getting a bit of freezer burn.
I will definitely be using this method again when I am freezing more of
my vegetables later in the year.
 |
| My peas ready to freeze! |
No comments:
Post a Comment