It is CSA day again, and my husband graciously spent the past couple days trying to clear out a lot of our produce from the previous week so we have room for this week's haul. Aside from our produce drawers, our fridge is mostly empty. This got me thinking...
It seems to me that one of the challenges to the American diet may be tied to the fridge. If our fridge was 3/4 produce drawers and 1/4 additional space, I wonder if we'd have more fresh fruits and vegetables in it. I wonder if that, once those produce drawers are full (which it doesn't take long to do), we figure that we've got enough fresh fruits and vegetables in the house that we have no need to have additional choices.
Just food for thought (pun intended).
My fridge is usually pretty empty. I tend to buy things as I need them. There will usually be salad dressing (though unlike certain people in my family I check the dates and toss as needed!), cheese, condiments, juice, and soda (though that was greatly reduced back when I had my Soda Stream). My freezer on the other hand is usually pretty full of individually frozen chicken breasts, or little sandwich baggies with a single serving of spaghetti sauce (I usually take the jar stuff, add meat and spices, and then divide it up) or other stuff like that which is probably only useful to a single person. Lately because of my coworkers visiting farms, I have been brimming with fresh herbs (seriously, they bring back literally giant garbage bags full of them) so I will be experimenting with freezing the basil. The internet seems to tell me that freezing the cilantro (or coriander as they call it here) is a lost cause and I think freezing rocket just seems like an exercise in futility.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Erwin, lettuces (like rocket) are the only foodstuff out there that you can't preserve in any way. Basil can be frozen. The obvious way is to make it into pesto and freeze it in ice cube trays (for single serving portions), but I think you should be able to freeze the individual leaves as-is. I haven't heard of anyone freezing cilantro/coriander, although I wonder if you could freeze it in some sort of media (i.e., making "herbal ice cubes" with it). Let me know how that turns out!
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't have a blender yet, so I can't make pesto - which really would have been the easiest way. So my first thought was coarsely chop, stuff in ice cube trays add water and freeze (the internet seemed to like this method as laying out the leaves on a cookie sheet to freeze individually just seemed like a lot of work. But then a coworker suggested using olive oil instead of water for the freezing. So I did that, but boy did I use a lot of oil. However, since it solidifies more than freezes, I figure I can just slice off some of the excess oil when it comes time to use it. Or I could just stick a cube in the pan if I'm going to saute something and it will be all flavorful and stuff. Next round I'll probably do just water.
DeleteThis led to one of the local team members asking why I froze it since we get fresh year round. I told her I was peer pressured into taking home too much of the fresh that we get and I didn't want to throw perfectly good stuff away. . .