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| This week we have mainly been drinking frozen margaritas. You? |
It all started with the frozen lemon slices. Before long, I was freezing pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down...
When you grow your own veg, you quickly learn
to love the freezer. We make huge batches of passata with our tomatoes
and freeze them for winter. Our entire basil crop gets frozen into a couple of dozen
bags of pesto. We freeze surplus veg. We freeze (as well as dry) homegrown chillies
and herbs.
I've even been known to keep a stash of emergency crumble topping in
the freezer. That's how dedicated I am to my chest freezer. But, lately, we’ve kicked it up a notch and are freezing
more than ever. Anyone else doing this? When we venture out to the shops, I buy
extra veg to cook down for the freezer. It’s all getting used, too, since we’re
eating like a pair of wrestlers.
I’ve even taken to freezing slices of banana
to make frozen banana daiquiris on demand. Anyone
else? Just me?
Onions can be frozen as well. I remember once seeing ready chopped, frozen onions in the supermarket and thinking (judgemental
goblin that I am), ugh, what kind of gross chav uses frozen onions? But
when we ran out of fresh onions recently, I would have been very grateful to
have a bag of frozen onions. So next time we went shopping, we
bought extra onions for freezing. Just dice and bag up in useful portions. Admittedly, it’s not the funnest way to spend an hour, peeling and
chopping a dozen onions...
We’re also freezing chopped, sauteed
mushrooms. This may sound like a faff, and it is, but when you’re making
something like veggie burgers from scratch, which already involves a lot of
elements, not having to clean and cook mushrooms is a big time-saver. Now we just
get a bag out of the freezer and they defrost in no time.
Speaking of burgers, when we’re going to
the effort of making our own veggie burgers (beetroot, carrots, onions,
mushrooms, spices, breadcrumbs, and whatever beans and lentils we have lying around), we
make a batch of at least 12 and freeze them before cooking. We also routinely keep
burger buns (sometimes bought, sometimes homemade) in the freezer. Since
the burgers can be cooked from frozen and the buns don’t take long to defrost,
we’re only ever 30 minutes away from smashing a delicious burger into our
mouths. There’s something deeply reassuring about that, especially now that we’re
eating like wrestlers.
In case you’re worried that our fridge is feeling
left out, it isn’t. It’s full of mysterious jars, like that jar of chickpea
cooking water, or the used-up gherkin jar that we refuse to throw away because the
pickling solution is good for dressings.
Reader, we've started pickling dill. (Just pack some chopped dill into a jar, pour hot white vinegar over the top,
fasten and store in the fridge when cool.) It’s not as strong as fresh dill, but it gives a good enough dill-y hit for burger sauces and dressings.
Most of the garlic in the shops at this time
of year is abysmal and won’t keep for long. (We’ve long since used up our
homegrown garlic from last year.) So when we finally found a stash of decent garlic in a local shop, we bought LOADS of it and spent a good hour peeling
every clove to store in vinegar (again, pack the cloves into a jar and pour over
hot vinegar. Store in the fridge when cool).
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| Now, full disclosure, home-pickled garlic does have a worrying tendency to turn blue, but The Internet assures us this is perfectly fine and nothing to worry about. |
I should stress again that we live only 10 miles
from a well-stocked supermarket. Clearly all this activity stems from a need to
try and control events, rather than any real fear that we’re going to starve. But
from a control-freakery point of view, it’s working wonders.
How is your inner control freak making itself
known?
