Preserving Green Beans

With the start of school and soccer commitments I realized that we would not get through all of the green beans in the fridge before they went bad. So last night, I froze them to add to our stock of vegetables for the winter.

I left half of them whole and cut the rest into 1" pieces. This means that there were two piles, each about 9-ounces of beans.

Next, I blanched them for 3 minutes in boiling water, drained them, and then plunged them into ice water to stop the cooking process. The last step before putting them into labeled zip-lock bags was to dry them gently on a towel. This was basically the process outlined in the book Preserving the Harvest, which has lots of helpful info for this type of process.

Doing this sort of stuff makes me think about possibly doing the Dark Days Challenge... but I will need to do a lot more freezing to make this possible.