[The following is from our friend Dave at Meh.]
My father-in-law enjoys gardening. In reality, yearly, his backyard’s output ticks up little by little, and now, he grows greater than he might ever use himself, and so he provides a lot of it away to family and friends. Which means, once we go to in the summertime, we get despatched residence with three or 4 bins of no matter’s prepared for choosing.
Effectively, this 12 months, our visits did not coincide with tomato season. Which is a bummer, as a result of we like to make contemporary tomato sauce. We requested if he would not thoughts freezing some for us so we might make sauce and soup all winter. He mentioned he had lots, so how a lot did we wish? We mentioned, nevertheless a lot he might give us, we would take!
Welp, this is an image of the within of our large basement freezer proper now:
And that is one shelf. There are a lot of, many extra all full of vacuum-sealed, frozen tomatoes.
Additionally, some peppers:
Now, will these tomatoes and peppers thaw into completely plump peak-of-the-season variations of themselves? Completely not. However once more, they’re gonna go into tomato sauce or tomato soup or salsa. We’re grinding them up is what I am saying. So who cares what they appear to be!
And that tomato sauce? We’ll use it to make some lasagna, and we’ll reduce the leftovers into slices, vacuum seal them individually, and freeze them. Or we’ll have it with spaghetti and meatballs, the surplus of which we’ll additionally vacuum seal and freeze. And that aforementioned salsa? It will be excellent with the carnitas or beef barbacoa that we’ll make large batches of, portion out, vacuum seal, and freeze.
Look, having a stocked freezer simply makes life simpler, as a result of when it is 4pm and you are like, “Wait, what’s for dinner tonight?” the reply is not “Takeout” or “Oh, crap, I will rush to the shop and get one thing easy to make.” It is, “I will seize one thing scrumptious and ready-to-go from the freezer.”
And if you wish to inventory a freezer, you are gonna desire a good vacuum sealer. Like this one.