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| How to preserve those fresh tomatoes in your freezer - no canning necessary! |
How to Preserve Tomatoes in the Freezer
In the South, our growing season starts early and lasts a good while, so even for those who don't typically garden, it is practically an obligation to at least grow some tomatoes, even if it's a simple as a few 5 gallon buckets placed strategically around the yard.
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| “I am an old Southern woman. It is my obligation to wear funny hats and grow tomatoes”. ~Weezy |
I have sure been
enjoying fresh tomatoes out of the garden the past few weeks, juicy and sliced nice and thick onto sandwiches, or as big, meaty chunks in
a simple cucumber and onion salad, and while I do have a few green ones still out there and a few more blossoms popping up, I think it's time to put a few away, don't you?
By the way,
that is an untouched photograph y'all ... aren't they just gorgeous? Every one of those came out of my garden. I might not have gotten any peppers or beans to produce this year, but I sure had some purrtaay 'maters!!
Anyhoo... I haven't gotten into the whole canning thing with home vegetable gardening. For one, I just don't have that nice pantry storage space like many of you do. For another, I only do a small kitchen garden due to limited sunny areas in my yard, so I've never had a huge garden that really produced enough
to "put away." What I do have, however, is a stand-alone freezer, so I like the freezer method of putting away tomatoes because 12 bags stacked up in the freezer sure take up a lot less space than jars in the pantry.
Now, do understand, just like store-bought canned tomatoes, you can't use these freezer tomatoes as a substitute for fresh either - you'll have to go pluck one fresh out of your garden for those kinds of recipes, but these tomatoes are perfect for use
in spaghetti and
pan sauces,
soups and stews, skillet dinners and
casseroles - things like that, which is really mostly what I used canned tomatoes for anyway. Now if you prefer canning, well, I am only beginning to can minor things like jams and jelly, but there are tons of tutorials out there to show you how to put up tomatoes properly. The freezer method is just one good way to preserve tomatoes, but it's a great way to put up tomatoes if you don't want to fool with canning or lack the space for those jars.
Oven bacon is the easiest way to cook a lot of bacon at once, but first, I want to address a subject that interestingly several long time readers have contacted me about recently, and that is to ask what I think about this new low carb trend among some southern food bloggers, to which I respond, "there's a trend??"
