GardenSpotlight

There are many different methods for preserving fruits and vegetables.   As your gardens overflow and you wonder if you can eat all the bountiful harvest, home food preservation is a great way to capture it all for use later in the season.   It is also a fun activity for the entire family and everyone will be proud of their accomplishments!   There have been many methods used for preserving food over the years.    Many older methods have since been deemed to be unsafe and now, only several methods are recognized as safe.   They are the boiling water method, the pressure method, freezing and dehydrating.   The boiling water method is used to process high-acid foods at a temperature of 212 ° F for the period of time specified by the recipe used.   This method is used to destroy molds, yeasts, and certain bacteria as well as to de-activate enzymes which could spoil the food.   The boiling water method should not be used to process low acid fo...

One of our customers had asked how to blanch Swiss Chard for a special diet she is on. Blanching is a critical step for all vegetables being stored for more than one month, with one exception: those vegetables being used solely for their flavor, such as green onions, herbs and hot peppers, do not need to be blanched. Blanching is necessary in order to cleanse the produce of any remaining dirt and to kill any microorganisms. It also brightens the color, helps retain vitamins and reduces the action of enzymes that can destroy the fresh flavor of the produce when frozen for longer than the first month. As you can see, blanching is a most important step in freezing vegetables and must be done very carefully, but that does not mean it is difficult to do. On the contrary, it is actually very simple. First, wash, drain and prepare vegetables as you would normally for cooking, such as trimming ends and chopping into the size you would use in your recipes. I would recommend using 1 gal...