All summer, your garden battled rain, wind and cotton- tailed intruders. The last thing you want is for the fruits (and vegetables) of its labour to go to waste.
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uckily, there are several ways to preserve your homegrown goodies, depending on the time and money you are willing to spend on the process. The better news? The most effective method doesn’t take much of either, according to food and nutrition expert Dr. Snehil Dua. “I personally feel that one of the best ways to preserve food is just freezing the food,” says Dua, an instructor in the Department of Food and Human Nutritional Sciences at the University of Manitoba. “It leads to almost no destruction of vitamins and minerals, and as long as it’s frozen correctly, it’s safe forever.” While quality can deteriorate over time due to freezer burn, most frozen food lasts anywhere from two months to a year. Many veggies can just go from garden to freezer bag, but Dua — an avid gardener herself — recommends blanching your green beans, carrots, shelled peas and any other veggies that are bright in colour beforehand to inactivate the enzymes that cause them to lose their
colour, texture and flavour. Blanching is a deep heat treatment that involves placing the produce into a strainer and then dipping the strainer into boiling water for 30 seconds. Next you remove the strainer and rinse the veggies with cold water before throwing them into a freezer bag. “The heat treatment destroys the enzymes that would have otherwise deteriorated the flavour, the colour compound and the texture of the vegetables,” Dua says. There’s no need to blanch onions, Dua adds. Green onions can go straight to the freezer and regular onions can be cured by braiding their leaves and hanging them until a papery skin develops. She also doesn’t recommend blanching fruit, and that includes tomatoes. She just tosses hers into freezer bags because once they’re thawed out, they’re going to get mushy regardless of how they’re preserved. “I just grind them all together for cooking,” she says.
FALL 2024 PARADE of HOMES 53
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