Preserving Party!!

When you have wonderful friends you can ask them to come over on a Saturday afternoon/evening and get them to do manual labor with you.  For the promise of dinner mine helped me blanch, shock and freeze all the green beans, broccoli and swiss chard that we currently had in the fridge.  It went a little something like this:

Harvest and wash veggies...

Cut veggies into bite size pieces...

Blanch for a few minutes in a pot of boiling hot water.  Then immediately shock veggies by putting them into a bowl of cold water and ice cubes to stop the cooking and preserve crispness.

Veggies will be much brighter in color!

We portioned ours in regular sandwich bags and then placed them all in a freezer bag so that they wouldn't freeze in one gigantic clump.

Lastly, Max couldn't take all that garden excitement and decided to harvest all the potatoes.  The baby russets were volunteer experiments from last year where we simply cut up a few old potatoes and threw them in the ground.  The red skinned potatoes were grown from starters we bought at the store.  That's 20lbs of potatoes you are looking at and we didn't even use the entire bag we bought for only $5!  Yum.