Fresh, from the freezer

I was never a fan of frozen or canned food until my husband Jim and I started growing our own. Now, I find myself trolling the Internet for recipes, and asking local farmers for tips on making the fresh produce last.

Yesterday evening, I cut two oversized summer squash -- not zucchini, thankfully! -- from vines, adding to a collection of about four others on my mudroom shelves. I also went to the turnips, thinking I would pull a couple for dinner. I knelt down and saw that a collection of about two dozen had popped out of the ground all piled up on top of each other. It was time, I figured, to start thinking about winter.

Some of the my desire to freeze, can, and otherwise store is economic. The more frozen vegetables that I can keep in my freezer to use in soups, stews, or broths, the less we will spend this winter at the local farmers market and (gasp!) grocery store. Beyond economics, however, is a question of freshness and the mere joy of eating food throughout the year that you created yourselves. Last April, as we were eating the last of our potatoes from the previous fall harvest, we also bought some cold-storaged potatoes from one of the local farmers. We could swear that our potatoes -- sprouting leaves and all -- still tasted better than the ones we got at the market. Probably just because they were ours.

I am not a CSA subscriber, largely because now we grow almost all of the vegetables we eat as well as eggs. I never was a fan of such services because I felt that having a box delivered to you each week took away some of the fun of the shopping itself. But a colleague in Minneapolis shared a secret with me last winter about how she and her family had made the most of their CSA box. As the abundance of whatever vegetables were in season filled their CSA box, her family would chop, curry, and freeze, ensuring that they had a steady supply of warm savory meals throughout the winter.

I decided this year that I would try and give that method a try, using the vegetables in abundance from our garden in place of a CSA.

So one day this week -- perhaps Friday after my 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. date with my book manuscript ends -- will be chop, cook, and freeze day. Overflowing my garden right now are radishes, turnips, and squash. The two squash fruits that I cut the other night weigh six and a half pounds, total. A recipe for a squash soup calls for one and a half pounds. I figure I'll triple the recipe and make either a zucchini crust pizza or zucchini bread with whatever squash is left over. Our next door neighbor is recovering from a back injury and one of my co-workers recently had knee surgery. Both could use a fresh batch of soup. The recipe, tripled, is supposed to make about 18 cups. After we share some with our neighbor and co-worker and enjoy some ourselves, I figure we'll have about nine cups left over for freezing, easily enough for three winter meals.

Turnips pose a different kind of challenge. The variety we grow are known as Hakurei, and are considered a "salad" turnip. Although we like to wrap them in foil and cook them like a baked potato, my search for Hakurei turnip recipes revealed that many people recommend eating them raw. Unlike the kinds of purple and pink storage turnips that show up in markets between Thanksgiving and Easter, Hakurei turnips also do not store particularly well. One of the farmers at the Saratoga Farmers Market, in fact, advised us to just take off the tops and store them in the refrigerator for one or two weeks.

The two dozen or so that literally leaped into my hands the other night would take us about a month to eat in the way that we like them. I did find several recipes, however, for turnip purees as well as a creamy turnip soup. So I'm going to do two things: I'm going to make the turnip soup, and I am going to use our freezer wrapper to create one bag of frozen turnips -- just to see if they work. Hakurei turnips grow fast and well into late fall, so we plan to continue planting and eating them fresh for as long as I can.

       The soup recipe, by the way, looks to make about five cups of soup from four turnips. So I figure that if I turn the entire two dozen into soup, we'll be able to pretty much duplicate the summer squash strategy. So that gives us three more winter meals. If you think in terms of winter lasting 24 weeks and one night of each of those weeks being a "soup from the freezer" night, I've got one-fourth of those weeks covered with summer squash and turnips. And there's still nine different kinds of winter squash in the garden coming into full bloom.

The radishes are rather tricky. We are growing an Easter egg variety, which produces lovely colorful pink, red, and purple skinned radishes that have a sweet and spicy flavor. Unfortunately, the radishes also grow very fast and tend to toughen and lose their sweetness if they're left in the ground too long. Like Hakurei turnips, they also lack a shelf life, and will last in a refrigerator for about a week. However, I have read that you can store them in dirt or sand at about 32 degrees, creating a mini root cellar of sorts. So I might give that tactic a try. I also would like to pickle some radishes for use with some of the Indian- and Mexican-inspired dishes we eat, and perhaps make a soup, if I can find a recipe.

In the meantime, Jim is planning to can our first batch of salsa verde using the green chili peppers that just began filling our plants and some of the multitude of green tomatoes on the 168 or so tomato plants that we planted last year.

These are our ideas for now. Stay tuned for more.