Cheapo Cooking Tips For Saving Fresh Vegetables
Freeze 'Em, Soup 'Em, and Buy When They're Cheap and Fresh
Oct 8, 2009
The rule of thumb is: Eat it while it’s fresh. If it isn’t being eaten, and it’s still fresh-ish, don’t toss it. Instead, freeze it for later use.
Save Money on Food: Buy Local, Seasonally
Sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. So here’s one truism: locally grown, in-season vegetables are often cheaper and fresher than the same items shipped from afar or abroad.
Plus, buying fresh, locally grown vegetables is a “greener” way to eat, considering the carbon footprint — the amount of energy used just for transportation — of foods that have been trucked 1,000 miles, or shipped into the US from another country.
Save Money By Using Not-So-Great Fresh Vegetables (sssh)
There’s nothing more discouraging than this: hoping for a salad, and then opening the fridge to find a soft tomato, droopy carrots and a bag of fresh but slightly slimy spinach. Everyone knows that it's important to consume fresh fruits and vegetables. But, who hasn’t let fresh produce sit a little too long in the fridge, uneaten and unused? This is a particularly annoying experience if the produce happens to be expensive and organic. No question, organic produce is better health wise, and it’s gorgeous — but it’s often fragile, with a short shelf life.
One might not advertise this, say, to one’s mother-in-law, but it’s fine to freeze slightly dated vegetables. Some slightly-wilted celery or carrots might not go in a lunchbox, but they're likely good enough to flavor a soup stock. And once in the minestrone, nobody’ll be the wiser that those daintily diced cubes of green and red pepper were, when whole, slightly mottled and a little soft on the side. Ditto most mushrooms, whose appearance gets worse, not better with cooking (admittedly, a matter of opinion.)
Obviously, cut out and toss anything that is moldy, rotten, or generally yukky. But there's no need to always throw the entire baby out with the bathwater.
Freezing Fresh Vegetables and Fruits
Foodies who grow their own vegetables will, admirably, take the time to maximize every nutrient by properly blanching every bean — and if it comes from a home garden, why not? But for supermarket shoppers, multi-taskers and the culinarily-challenged, there’s still hope of saving money by using every scrap of those expensive fresh veggies.
Just do it. Freeze them. True, not every ounce of goodness will be preserved. But something, perhaps a micro-ounce, will. And when winter rolls around, how lovely to have a bag full of organic, pre-cut, inexpensive veggies to toss into the wok.
Wash, de-seed, and slice the vegetables. Fussy types should take care to cut the vegetables in the shape of choice. For instance, if a favorite dish is strips of green and red peppers fried with beef or chicken, then remember to cut the vegetables accordingly, and not in smaller chunks. Slackers and the indecisive will be cheered to know that shape decisions can be postponed, for months, in fact. Thankfully, even large chunks of frozen bell peppers are easily bent or cut.
Having jumped the shape hurdle,shake excess water off, and freeze.
To get the maximum health benefit, peel and seed tomatoes, and blanch carrots, corn, and beans. (It’s not necessary with peppers and onions.) Still, if it’s a choice between a) not using the produce at all, b) waiting until winter and buying more expensive produce, and c) freezing it as-is, choose "c." It’s more economical to just freeze as-is.
And then, of course, there's the question of how to stash the about-to-be-frozen veggies. Some people prefer to package individual bags of mixed vegetables to toss into a stir-fry or soup in the colder months. Others like large bags of just one item, and following a Noah's Ark logic of like-with-like, elect to store the peppers with peppers, mushrooms with mushrooms, and so on. Different strokes for different folks.
If there’s a labeling machine in the house, one might label each bag with what’s inside and the date.
Note that certain things, such as green leafy spinach, lettuces, kale and herbs such as basil, parsley, and cilantro do not take well to home freezing. Stick with less fragile, thicker produce.
It's fun to freeze for the months ahead. And, wasting fresh produce is expensive in three ways. It costs money, and wastes time. Most importantly, wasting fresh produce is a lost opportunity for healthy eating. Buy in season, and freeze away.
 |
