Cookerati

These are three things that I freeze to be used at a later time. I don’t like waste, so I can’t see throwing good food away (or into the compost) when it can be preserved for later use. The last weeks or so before the first big frost peppers seem to kick into over drive.  We pick the big and medium ones and hope that before a hard freeze comes along the plants will put in all of their energy into making those smaller peppers grow.  On one end of the road, and down the other there was a frost last week, we covered the peppers, tomatoes and other plants, but in the morning we had a thick fog and no frost.  We were lucky, but it was a warning to us that we needed to take some time and get the peppers ready for freezing before they froze on the vine – not a pretty sight. 

• Peppers – Peppers freeze well, but you won’t have the same firm peppers when they are thawed.  They will be soft, but can be used in cooking.  My suggestion is that you dice, or slice your peppers while they are still frozen.  So I take them out when I am preparing them, I don’t defrost them. These peppers can be used when cooking up your ground beef, or in slices for fajitas (as long as you don’t want them firm).  Use them in casseroles, stews and stocks.  Anyway you use peppers for cooking, you can use these peppers, though their texture is a lot softer.  I slice the peppers in half, the clean out the core, de-stem them, rinse and pat dry.  You can store your peppers already diced, or sliced, or leave them in half.  I usually sort my peppers into different zippered bags so that they aren’t mixed.  I don’t want to accidentally pick up a hot pepper or get it mixed in to a recipe unintentionally.  Then squeeze out as much air as possible. My sister in law mentioned to me that she diced hers and placed it into a sandwich size bag and then placed all of her sandwich size bags into a bigger gallon freezer bag.  This makes it easy to grab a meal size amount in one little bag.

• Onions – I freeze onions all year long.  I don’t like to waste, so when I have a half of an onion, I prep it for later and stick it into the freezer.  Like peppers, it won’t be as firm, so you can slice and dice it up ahead of time, or quarter it as you wish, but if you slice it when you are putting your meal together, do it while it’s frozen.  Again, putting it into smaller sandwich bags, then put the sandwich bag into a bigger gallon bag.  I never worry about running out of onions as long as I have some in my freezer.

• Ginger – I saw this on Rachel Ray. I hate to see ginger sitting in my refrigerator going bad and thought it was an excellent suggestion.  Scrape the ginger, place it into a zippered bag, squeeze out the air and freeze. You just grate the ginger frozen, taking just what you need and put the rest back into the freezer.  Cool Idea, huh?