Mixing It Up

You know vegetables are good for you, so what's better for you than one veggie? Yep, you guessed it - 2 or more. What's even better is that you can freeze your own mixed vegetables and make up your own favorite medleys.

Once Upon a Time, some creative cook wondered what would happen if corn and lima beans spent some quality time together. And you know what happened next. Succotash was born and became everyone's first mixed vegetable.

After that, another inventive person mixed up some peas and carrots and that became as common as succotash. A trend was born. The game was afoot!

Don't stop there, however. There's a wealth of lonely veggies out there in the world just waiting for a matchmaker to come along and pair them up with another kindred soul. In fact, the trend today is the create a medley - three or more veggies all happily sharing the same freezer bag.

You can spend a tidy sum of money on mixed veggies at the grocery store and you might be disappointed with what you get. Usually the cheapest vegetable is the one that takes more than its fair share of the bag. Carrots are notorious for this shameful behavior. That means in a bag of frozen peas, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots (you guessed it) you're probably going to get more carrots than any of the other contenders.

So, what to do? Simple. Make up your own combinations. What vegetables do you like? How will you use them? These questions will guide your choices.

I do quite a bit of stir fry, so I like broccoli, cauliflower, red and green bell pepper strips, sugar snap peas, and mushrooms for one combo.

Another favorite includes water chestnuts, red and green bell pepper strips, onion slices, celery, and bok choi.

Dinner and A Mixed Vegetable

Marc Matsumoto who tweets as norecipes and who, in his spare time, co-hosts Dinner and a Movie checked in with mushrooms, corn and fava beans as his choice.

Go for the crunch, not for the mush

Follow the normal procedures for freezing vegetables. This means blanching and quick cooling (peppers don't need blanching).

Hodge Podge Friday

Tying up the week here with some odds and ends. The Great Spinach Harvest begins tomorrow and I'm looking forward to stocking the freezer with fresh greens. Spinach is my first real putting-up food of the season, and if the weather co-operates it won't bolt before I get a good supply in.

Husband likes his spinach with a splash of vinegar, but I'm partial to a gob of butter. As one of my friends says, "Anything that's a vehicle for butter is a good food."

Carrot Carnage

This morning I finally got around to thinning two rows of carrots. Two very long rows. While my knees are sounding like castanets and I'm currently walking like Quasimodo, it feels good to have this chore done. This is definitely my least favorite garden chore. Ripping out perfectly nice little plants goes against the grain, and carrots aren't good candidates for transplanting. I do lay them alongside the living to help shade the soil, so that works.


Cherry Pie

Finishing up with the cherries now, and as promised, here's my recipe for a great cherry pie. You can wrap it and freeze it and it'll keep fine for about a year - but why wait? Don't keep your food in the freezer until The End of Time. Have a plan to rotate the stock so that you eat your frozen food while it's in the prime.

First, Ramona's No-Fail Pie Crust

Ingredients:

1 cup Crisco
2 cups flour
1 Tsp. salt
6 Tbsp. ice water

Method:

Mix flour and salt thoroughly and cut in Crisco.Add ice water- 1 tbsp. at a time - and continue mixing. Roll out dough and shape into pie pan. You can bake it at 400 degrees F. for 8-10 minutes and then freeze OR you can leave it unbaked and fill it with -

Cherry Pie Filling

Ingredients:

1 quart pie cherries (tart cherries)
1 1/2 - 2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp. cornstarch or flour
1/4 tsp. almond extract

Method:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Mix all ingredients thoroughly in a large mixing bowl then dump the lot into an 8 inch pie pan. Cover with a perky lattice crust. Bake 20 minutes then reduce heat to 375 degrees for an additional 10-15 minutes or until crust is nicely browned and cherry mixture is bubbly. Serve with vanilla ice cream.