Q&A Wednesday - Freezing Fresh Foods

After my post listing out my kitchen staples last week, Kendra asked, "This was helpful to see what you keep in the freezer. I need to be better about freezing things before we need to pitch it. Like the chicken broth in my frig right now! :-) A couple of questions: The chopped onion & celery in your freezer, is that what you've chopped from fresh and then frozen in little ziplocs? Also, how do you make your bread crumbs, just process the heels till crumbly? Thanks for sharing this! :-)"

I try to set aside about an hour a week to prepare food for the freezer. I freeze almost everything. Usually fresh foods that I don't think I'll use before they expire or things that I want to be ready-to-go for labor intensive recipes.

When I get lots of celery, onions and bell peppers at the produce co-op, I usually cut most of them up to freeze. I've noticed that if I fill up a whole zipper bag, they will be in a huge frozen lump when I need to use them. Instead, I've learned to leave a little room and freeze the bag flat so I can easily manipulate half of the onions out of the bag and return the rest to the freezer, if needed.

We often get "weird" stuff from the co-op; things that I know we won't eat like kale, artichokes, yams and eggplant. I'll cut those up, too, and freeze them to hide in pastas, quiches or soups. I even cut up and freeze the broccoli stems that I used to throw out.

I also tend to puree vegetables (spinach, kale, sweet potatoes, beets) to hide in casseroles and sauces. Cauliflower can be easily hidden in mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs.

For bread crumbs, I keep a zipper bag with the heels of our loaves of bread on the top shelf of the freezer. When I have time, I'll put the leftover bread in the food processer and make crumbs. Sometimes I bake them on a cookie sheet for 8-10 minutes to dry them out, sometimes I put them back in the freezer without baking. I use the baked bread crumbs for meatballs and things that are mixed INto a recipe and the non-baked bread crumbs on top of casseroles (because they'll get baked/dried out anyway).

I hope that was helpful. Any other questions about freezing???