written by Yvonne
Due to lots of rain and very cool temperatures, we have an extraordinary amount of greens. Over the last few weeks we have given away bags and bags to friends. That had kept us just about even with the pace they are growing. We got another week of periodic rain and more cool temperatures and we lost the fight. We officially cannot harvest and eat the amount of spinach and collards the garden is producing. (It's one of those good/bad problems, I know.) :)
The other day, as I was cooking up a batch of grits and greens (yum!) I started thinking about how I might be able to preserve some of this spinach. I could can it, but I just don't think I'd use canned spinach. Especially considering I don't even buy spinach in a can now. However, I DO use frozen spinach. In fact a few of the recipes I've been making call for frozen spinach but I just saute our fresh and use it instead. Yes, freezing it is!
We harvested as much spinach as we could, as well as some collards. The collards we'll eat this week for dinner but all of the spinach was used for our freezing experiment. We crammed these baskets full and ended up with just over 8 lbs of spinach and 2 lbs 10 oz of collards!
We used every large vessel we owned for this process. The process was: pull off the large stems, wash the spinach, pull out the smallest leaves that can be used for salads....
blanch the spinach by dropping as much as would fit into a stock pot of boiling for 3 minutes then shocking it in ice-water for 3 minutes...
then set them to dry on towels. The wilted greens on the left are the blanched spinach; the ones on the right are the washed collards.
We weighed out 10oz portions ('cause I think that's how much a box of frozen spinach is) and ended up with 8 10-oz. portions. The spinach bunches will sit in the freezer for a day or so, then we'll take them out and wrap them individually so they'll be ready to use. If we remember we'll try and report on how it goes the first time we use any in the future.
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