At the end of each storage season we find ourselves unable to part with our seconds onions.  These are onions with blemishes or with a soft outerlayer.  They aren't first quality and can't go to share members, but they have perfectly good onion within.  At the same time, it's also the time of year when our stores run low in anticipation of the new harvest.  In order to keep our members in local organic onions, we slice and freeze these seconds.  The bagged frozen onions  may be used in any saute or soup you are making.  They are great to have on hand.  Just take bag from freezer and saw off a chunk of the thin sliced onion in the amount you need for your recipe and toss in your pan or pot just like you would fresh onion and simmer til soft. If you don't need the whole bag of sliced onion, return the remainder to the freezer.

Our Frozen Green or Red Peppers are grown on our farm, come in from the field and go straight into the freezer. Our peppers are washed, chopped, bagged and frozen within hours of harvest.  Frozen peppers tend to not have the same rigidity as fresh peppers so they aren't great in salads or where you need crisp vegetables.  But they retain all the flavors and yummy summer goodness and are great in all cooked dishes.  We find it best to use the vegetables straight out of the freezer and into the pan.  If you aren't using the whole package you can saw off a hunk and use just what you need.  While the peppers are frozen, or just off frozen, you can easiuly chop them to whatever size you need if the pieces are too large for your dish.  Kids love the red ones frozen as is, they are that sweet. 

Our frozen broccoli was blanched for a minute or two in our kitchen before cooling and freezing.  It is not a substitute for fresh broccoli in salads or places where you really need the veggies to be crisp.  But they are fantastic for pastas, burritos, casseroles, quiches, soup etc. To reheat, bring some water to a boil in a pot and put in all or a part of the bag of broccoli (you can saw off chunks of frozen if you don't want to use the whole thing). Heat for 2-5 minutes, testing each minute after 2 minutes to see if it has reached the tenderness you seek.

We grow several verieties of cauliflower on the farm including the traditional white, a yellow known as cheddar, a purple variety, and the beautiful Romanesca.  All of these may be used interchangeably in recipes of course.  We freeze our summer cauliflower so that our members have greater diversity in winter.  Frozen cauliflower is great in many recipes including soups, stir fries, stews, casseroles, etc.  Our frozen cauliflower is blanched briefly before freezing so is partly pre-cooked, cooking times for recipes calling for fresh cauliflower will be shorter.  You will want to test your cauliflower when cooking for perfect doneness as some recipes will want cauliflower more or less tender.  Store your frozen cauliflower in the freezer until you are ready to use it.  I like to chop for recipes when it it still partly frozen 

Together with our neighbors and buddies at High Mowing Organic Seeds we have a mission to figure out how to preserve some of the organic produce they grow for seed crops.  In order to harvest organic seed for their business, High Mowing grows lots of squash, melons and tomatoes (and many other crops).  Their normal harvest process for these vegetables is to harvest them in the field, and send them through a big crusher that screens out the seeds, leaving piles of squash, melons and tomatoes in the soil to compost. This past season, we brought their entire crop of OrangeGlo watermelons (one of the best flavored watermelons around) to the farm.  We crushed them here and scooped the watermelon flesh out and then the flesh was passed through our puree machine in our commercial kitchen.  The seeds came out beautifully intact and the remaining product is the delicious treat you will find in the week's share, pure sweet watermelon juice!  The juice comes to you frozen and you should keep it frozen until you plan to use it.  It won't have a long shelf life, a few days in the fridge at most.  But it won't last long either.  It's delicious on its own and terrific in seltzer.  Kids will love frozen watermelon ice cubes.

In the Fall we put up our year's worth of frozen squash puree. The annual making of our squash puree is a joint effort. High Mowing Seeds grows several super sweet varieties of winter squash in order to collect the seeds for their customers. They do the seed extraction at our farm and we take all the flesh of the squash and steam it to make the puree. We choose varieties with a very high sugar content like Butternuts and pie pumpkin varieties.  

This is just pure frozen winter squash goodness. Use this in recipes calling for pureed winter squash or pumpkin - particularly soups, pie, baked items like pumpkin bread, muffins or cookies, or for casseroles or rice dishes. Also fantastic just on its own sweetened with a bit of maple syrup, enriched with some cream and served as a side (for a side you may want to drain some of the water that separates from the squash when you thaw it. Your puree will then be a bit thicker). 


If your frozen squash puree has thawed a bit when you receive it, no worries. Just pop it back in freezer until you are ready to use.