Dark Days: Deep freeze

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I mentioned recently that I’ve felt compelled to really dig in to my freezer to eat up all the fantastic vegetables I froze last year.  There’s a certain amount of guilt attached to wasting things that I either grew myself and/or spent time to preserve.  There’s really only four months or so left until Spring crops come available, and I want to face the season with an empty freezer.

There was a Delmonico steak from Natural Acres in my fridge, so I dug around in the freezer to see what I could find.  As it turns out, I had a big bag of Delicata squash from my CSA share that I roasted with local honey and then froze, as well as some really lovely Swiss chard from my garden.  I even remember the day that I froze the bag of Swiss chard - it was in September and the Swiss chard patch was going crazy!

A little deeper in the freezer was a small bag of red bell peppers from the CSA share that were roasted on the grill.  I froze them instead of preserving in oil because I wasn’t sure how long the peppers would last in oil.

I grilled the steak (just barely - I like my beef to moo), heated up the squash in the oven, and sauteed the chard with some chopped local garlic and a bit of olive oil, and at the last minute seared the roasted peppers.  Along with a slice of the bread and a little bit of the butter I made on Tuesday, it was a really great Winter meal and a good use of my frozen vegetables.