Freezing Greens

This week’s CSA haul was 14 greens, and  carrots: 4 heads of lettuce (red leaf and romaine), 1 bunch of arugula, 1 head of bok choy, 1 head of broccoli, 1 bag of snap peas, 2 heads of chicory, 1 bunch of mustard greens, 1 bunch of red chard, 1 bunch of turnips with greens, 1 bunch of radishes with greens, and 1 bunch of carrots (with greens, but their greens are inedible).

Our refrigerator was still overflowing with greens from last week, so it was time to do a large batch of freezing.  We ended up freezing 2 bunches of kale from last week, both of the 2 heads of chicory from this week, the 1 bunch of mustard from this week, and this week’s turnip and radish greens together (because together they were roughly the quantity of one bunch of other greens).

I was initially leery of freezing anything that I wasn’t used to buying frozen at the grocery store.  I had it all backwards.  We rarely get peas, so we’ve never tried freezing them.  Green beans sometimes freeze well but sometimes end up stringy.  Broccoli that we freeze ourselves loses most of its texture and appeal.  Spinach doesn’t seem sturdy enough for home freezing.

On the other hand, we’ve had great success freezing kale, collards, mustard greens, eggplant, peppers, beets, corn, zucchini, and butternut squash.  We’ve had moderate success with tatsoi (leaves are good, stems get even more difficult to chew) and green beans (as I said before, sometimes they’re excellent, sometimes they’re stringy).  I gave general directions for freezing stuff last year, but I think it’s time to give directions more specific to greens.  If you really want to know what you’re doing, and in a form easy to have in the kitchen, invest in a copy of Putting Food By for which you can find bibliographical information on my References and Resources page.

Directions for Freezing Cooking Greens

1. Wash the greens thoroughly.
2. Cut them into whatever size you’ll want later.
3. Immerse the greens in a pot of boiling water for 2 minutes (except for collards, which get 3 minutes).
4. Immerse the greens in ice water for 2 minutes or longer, to stop the cooking process.
5. Drain the greens as well as possible.
6. Freeze.  For easier defrosting, freeze one bunch in a gallon bag, spread flat, so the greens form one thin layer.

Tips:  A deep-fry basket or metal colander works well for holding the greens.  Metal tongs work well for moving the colander from boiling water to ice water.  Use the tongs to pick up the greens and put them into a bag for freezing, too.  It’s important to keep everything sterile, because anything that gets into the greens could cause them to go bad sooner.

What do you do with escarole?

This week brought more greens from our CSA.  Amazingly, there were no repeats from last week, although many of the items were similar:  bibb lettuce instead of romaine and red leaf, Napa cabbage instead of bok choy, Swiss chard instead of spinach, escarole instead of chicory, and cilantro and collard greeens, both of which are not remotely replacements for the pea tendrils we got last week.

Escarole is related to chicory but the with big, broad leaves, more like bok choy.  It’s much less bitter than chicory, however.  Cookbooks suggested it as a salad green, but, while the stems are pleasantly crisp, the leaves are not.  They’re thicker, and have a sort of leathery quality, much like dandelion greens, although not nearly as bitter.  Escarole seems most often to be a soup green, but summer is the wrong time for soup.  If we freeze the other bunch, I’ll make soup with it in the winter.

I think of escarole as being an Italian food, or at least having an affinity for them.  I tried sauteeing it with garlic, olive oil, and  crushed red pepper flakes, then sprinkling with parmesan cheese, the way I would for chicory or broccoli rabe.  The escarole just tasted mild to the point of blandness.  The texture was lovely, though, with wilted greens and stems still a bit crunchy.  So I played around, adding some red wine vinegar, oregano, basil, and salt.  It works.  My seasonings were essentially an Italian vinaigrette:  olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, oregano, basil, salt, and parmesan, so I can now say that escarole makes a lovely cooked salad.  To make a meal, add cannelini or mozzarella and serve over pasta or rice.

CSA starts and Apple Bread

Our CSA began this week with greens, greens, greens, greens, and some more greens.  Specifically, we got two bunches each of red leaf lettuce, romaine lettuce, pea tendrils, spinach, chicory, and bok choy.  The bunches were so big that they wouldn’t all fit in our refrigerator without difficulty.

That gave us the push we needed to start right away saving for winter.  My husband washed, chopped, blanched, shocked, and froze one of the heads of chicory.  It will be good over pasta with cheese and mushrooms.  Between the time they were first cultivated and the time air conditioning was introduced, mushrooms were a winter crop.

We also cooked the spinach, both bunches, because it takes up so much less space that way. It ended up in a pasta sauce that is basically bechamel sauce with chopped spinach and parmesan cheese.  It made a lot of sauce.  When we have the leftovers, I think we’ll puree the sauce so that it spreads over the pasta better.   I hope that pureeing it doesn’t take away its fresh, green, spinach-y flavor.

We can almost defrost our chest freezer for the summer.  Everything but a few tubs of soup fits easily into the freezer attached to our refrigerator.  I could probably make it all fit, with some time and effort.  We’re reducing what’s in the freezer, still.  The night before our first CSA drop-off, we enjoyed a stir-fry of tofu with tatsoi and Asian eggplant, both from the freezer.  I am pleased to report that both froze satisfactorily.  The tatsoi stems became even tougher and harder to chew than when they’re fresh, and the eggplant was on the softer side but it did still have texture.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well just about everything freezes.  Putting Food By seems to get it right, every time.

The apple bread I wrote about in my last post turned out pretty well, so here’s the recipe.  If you didn’t save a glut of apples this year, come back to this recipe in October when there are lots and they’re cheap.

Apple Quickbread or Muffins (vegan)

Most quantities are guesses.

2 1/2 cups flour, white or whole wheat (dark spices make it brown anyway)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cloves, nutmeg, ginger

2 tsp cinnamon

2 or 3 tsp salt

3 apples, diced small

1 cup water, or less

1 1/2 cup applesauce

Mix dry ingredients.
Mix apple pieces in to coat with flour mixture.
Add half of water and then applesauce, stirring to mix evenly. If dough is too dry, add the remaining water.
Oil and flour a 9×9 baking dish (or a dozen muffin tins).
Pour in batter.
Bake at 400 degrees for 50 minutes.

Farmers markets are open

Since I last posted, both of most-nearby farmers markets have opened.  There’s a market I can get to easily by bicycle almost every day of the week, but only two are easy to walk to.  Our CSA will start drop-offs this week.  This is the beginning of the season when I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t eat locally.

This spring was an unusually good growing season.  Unlike last year when the farmers market had only radishes and rhubarb (and a bit of arugula) on opening day, this year there were all kinds of greens available, and turnips in addition to radishes. My husband brought home spinach (to enjoy as a raw salad), chard (which was my favorite green for a few years – I don’t think I have a favorite currently), collards, and rhubarb.  He could easily have bought enough things for us to eat a different vegetable every day all week, but we still have a lot of freezer stores to eat down.

We ate the spinach with beet wedges thawed from the freezer, under balsamic vinaigrette.  Blue cheese would have been nice but we didn’t have any.  The collards we enjoyed, as usual, cooked with black beans in olive oil, garlic, basil, cumin, cayenne, and salt, served over brown rice.  The chard joined white beans in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, sage, salt and pepper, served over pasta.  The rhubarb is probably going to become ice cream sauce and go into our freezer until we make ice cream to put it over.  Sauces freeze very well.

Our CSA farmer is concerned about losing some crops that matured too quickly for his drop-off schedule.  As I said, it was a weirdly good spring for growing greens and their roots.  I hope he was able to sell them at farmers markets instead.  When we saw him on Saturday, we asked the same question we ask all summer, “Is there anything here that we won’t get in our share this week?”  His answer was broccoli rabe so we bought some of that and then stopped at an Italian grocery on our way home to buy parmesan to use with it over pasta.

In anticipation of a glut of vegetables, I did a lot of cooking this weekend to get us eating down last year’s stores.  I roasted two full cookie sheets of root vegetables.  One of them was all carrots, an interesting mix of colors (yellow, orange, and purple) and sizes.  While they were still warm, I tossed them with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and parsley (the good part of what was left over from Passover – a lot of leftover parsley went into the compost).  We also had parsley in our freezer, and that went into a salad of bulghur and cooked lentils in a tabbouleh dressing.  The other cookie sheet was a rainbow mix of beets (one red, one yellow, and one red-and-white striped Chioggia), turnips, celeriac, parsnips, and more carrots.  Roasted in olive oil, salt, and pepper, they’ll be an easy side dish for some meal this week.

We didn’t make as many batches of applesauce last fall as I’d expected, and then we got more apples (local storage apples) through our winter CSA, so there are still lots of apples in our fridge.  Three of them went into an apples and spices sodabread that used a mix of applesauce and water as its binding liquid.  I don’t know yet how it came out.  A few others had to go directly into compost.  If the bread works, I still have enough apples to make many more loaves.