Making Food Last

Working on Food This Afternoon

Made Me Realize....

April 2, 2020

Last night I looked in the fridge and realized that if I didn't do something soon, with the ton of fresh veggies I bought just as we were told to stock up on things, they would go bad and have to be thrown in the compost heap. So, I decided I'd better make this afternoon about salvaging them, rather than about anything else at the moment, as nothing else was as urgent as that. So, I spent the afternoon blanching brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, parsnip, and asparagus. By doing that I managed to save about 21 meals for 2 worth of veggies, as I measure out the approximate amount we would consume between the 2 of us per meal and package that in a freezer bag for 1 meal. When I want those types of veggies I just get them and cook them as I would any other store bought frozen vegetables. ☃☃

I realized if I had that problem of having too many veggies on hand because of over buying more than we could possibly eat before they went bad, that there were maybe others out there with the same problem, who wouldn't know how to deal with the situation. Fortunately for me, having a garden has taught me a lot about food conservation/preservation, because when one broccoli head is ready to be harvested they usually all are. That's the thing about gardens, it's great to have a garden but if you aren't going to harvest and use all of it, what's the point of having one? And the thing with that is all your plants of a certain type will all become ripe and ready for harvest all around the same time.  So you'd better have a way of conserving or preserving them if you wish to be able to use them for your consumption. 🚯🚯

So I learnt that the quickest and easiest way to do that is to freeze the veggies, but you can't just take them from the garden (or grocery store in this case) and stuff them in freezer bags to freeze them except for peppers and corn (more about that afterwards). Most vegetables need to be blanched first before you can package them for freezing. To do that you bring a large pot of water to boiling, once it's reached boiling you can dump your veggies in it and then start timing 3 minutes from the time you see the water come back to boiling again. When the 3 minutes are up,  remove the veggies from the stove immediately and dump into a colander in the sink with cold running water running over the vegetables, until they are totally cold to the touch. Then if you don't have enough freezer bags to make separate portions per meal and want to freeze them altogether in one large bag, to keep them from sticking together you will either need to do 1 of 2 things, dump them all onto a parchament paper lined cookie sheet and separate them, and  freeze and when frozen dump them all into the one large bag, or dump them onto paper towel on your counter and dry them off so they don't freeze and stick together in the large freezer bag. That will save you a lot of problems later on when trying to get enough out of the bag for a meal. Or if you don't have the freezer space for a cookie sheet or are impatient and don't want to wait for them to dry enough so they won't stick together either, you could use plastic sandwich bags and put your meal's portions in those and then put those all into the large freezer bag. That will keep your portions separate and still be easily accessed & used. One thing though you should always write on the bag what's inside and what date it was packaged, so you know. 🍆🌽

Same with other food. For those of us who've been going crazy baking all kinds of goodies and then realizing you might've overdone it just a tad and now have too many goodies to be eaten before they go bad, most of those can be frozen too. Just take your breads, muffins, cupcakes, buns, cookies etc and package them in empty bread bags (if this crisis lasts long enough, you'll learn to basically save and reuse as much as possible including empty bread bags that are still clean & in good condition - along with the tie wraps and elastics on food etc, you won't be throwing anything out if you can still use it). It can all be frozen, so long as you have the freezer space for it all. You could also preserve some of your fresh fruit via baking. Bake the blueberries into muffins, or the apples into a pie, cake & muffins and freeze some while keeping others out to eat soon.  There are a lot of ways of ensuring that food isn't wasted.🍩🍪🍰

That includes the leftovers from tonight's dinner. No matter what it was, chances are you can use it for tomorrow's lunch, by making sandwiches out of the leftover meat, or frying up the veggies with some of the meat as what my parents called a "hash". Then you can also use left over meat to make soup with - pick all the meat off the bones to use in the soup and use the bones to make the soup stock/broth with. Some of the veggies from last night's meal can also be used in the soup.  If there's a lettuce in the fridge wilting, make a salad with it, you can use whatever vegetables and fruit you wish in it, or just by itself as a whatever lettuce type caesar salad. Or get fancy and make Asian lettuce cups with it. If you have a smorgasboard of veggies and meat sitting in the fridge from previous meals and a few eggs, make a frittata as a way of using them up. There is no reason to waste food. There are recipes galore on the net. I provided several links to recipes on here already, which you can avail yourself of. You will find that the less food you waste, the more meals you'll have without having to buy more food. And there's less going to landfill sites or city compost heaps (assuming you don't have a compost heap yourself - but if you did, you'd probably already know all this stuff as I explained before learning to conserve/preserve food comes with the territory of having a garden - hence a compost heap).🍝🍲🍛

When I have various types of fruit that all seems to want to go bad all at the same time, I take them and chopped them up together into a container to make fresh fruit salad with to use as dessert, or the fruit can be chopped and put into freezer bags for freezing, if you don't have the time to go crazy baking a ton of pies, muffins and cakes to use it all. Or you can look for good preserving recipes to make your own jam, jelly, chutney, salsa, marmalade, or whatever you desire and try preserving some of it (at least as freezer jam or to be kept in a fridge, if you don't have the necessary canning equipment). Like I said before there's no reason to waste food. IF (and I hope it doesn't) this lockdown drags on very long, you might find yourself wishing you didn't waste that food and that you still had it. So while you do still have it, look after it, so it keeps. Some bread machines comes with a jam cycle on it, that you can use to make many of those preserves with - but as they're limited in capacity you'll usually only be able to make 1 jar's worth at a time. 🍇🍉🍍

Above I mentionned peppers and corn in passing. Those are relatively easy to freeze. Just wash, seed, and chop/slice the pepper into the type/s of cut you'd normally use in cooking and put in a freezer bag to freeze. Shallots, and celery can just be chopped and put into freezer bags for cooking with (they won't be suitable for raw salads or the like). Corn can be cut off the cob and put into freezer bags for freezing, if you should have any of that at this time of year.  If you're using hot peppers, be careful, you can get seriously burnt handling raw cut hot peppers without protection. So use some plastic disposable gloves to handle those, while you're cutting those up.🌽🌽

For large pieces of meat. If you haven't cooked it yet (like say a large turkey or ham) you can cut it into portions (if it wasn't previously frozen) and package those to freeze. Large chuck roasts (whole pieces - usually weighing 20 lbs or more) can be butchered into roasts, steaks, cubes, strips, and whatever isn't suitable for those cuts can be ground into ground beef.  Maybe a good food grinder/grater/slicer would be good to have (we have one and have for as long as I can remember - ours is a Moulinex, but I don't think you can get those anymore but you can google it to get the idea of what I'm talking about) for that purpose.  Meat that's already been cooked you can also freeze, but you can't refreeze meat that's been frozen and thawed, without cooking it first. So if you have meat that you cooked for a dinner that you have a lot left from but don't want to eat it in the immediate future, you can freeze it for later use. Spaghetti sauces and most other sauces that I know of can be frozen in plastic containers (we save all our yogurt, margarine, ice cream, and other plastic containers for this purpose). Making a label to put on the container detailing the contents and the date helps when looking for it again.🍖🍗

If you or other family members don't like heels of the bread you can save them in a paper bag loosely folded over at the top to keep the light out in a dry place to let them dry out & harden. Then you can use the hardened bread to make bread crumbs with, by passing them through the food grinder, or if you don't have one, put them in an empty bread bag and roll over them with a rolling pin or other heavy item similar to a rolling pin. You can also take a tenderizer hammer and beat the bread slices (a couple at a time) with it to create bread crumbs (be careful not to puncture the bag though as you'll have a mess of crumbs everywhere - take it from someone who knows).  That's a way not to waste the heels of bread and get bread crumbs (used in several recipes) out of the deal. We haven't bought bread crumbs in years.🍞🍞

If anyone else has any other ideas on food conservation/preservation to add, we would love it if you would, so we can help each other with tips, tricks & advice to make it through these times.  Please use the comments section below to do so. 😄😄