Freezing Greens

Posted by Cris

I love salads! 

And when we started our garden lettuce and spinach were must haves.  I had never tried kale or swiss chard so I planted it too, thinking it must be delicious too.  Only its not. It's an acquired taste.  It's MUCH more bitter and I prefer it raw, but again it's the end of the season and there is still so much.  So we need to freeze it. Only I do NOT like cooked greens.  Sorry, I'm clearly not southern.  (I don't like fried foods or cooked greens.)  

However, I can tolerate cooked greens in soups. So that is my plan to use them up.

First you need to cut the stem out of the swiss chard and the kale.  Our kale was super small this year, last year it was huge.  No idea why (this year we had lots more rain).

Blanching comes next.  Blanching is just boiling the greens for 2 minutes.

 

 Then straining them and dunking them into an ice bath.

Next, I threw them in the salad spinner to dry them off and then set them on a cheese cloth towel to remove all the excess water. 

I folded the towel up a few times and pressed to dry them as best I could. 

Onto the food saver, Jon doesn't kid when he says it's one of our most used appliances. Sorry, It kind of looks like we are packaging drugs, since I wanted small, soup portions of greens. 

If you don't grow your own, these greens are cheap and readily available at farmer's markets or grocery stores and can be easily processed the same way.  However, after cooking, they shrink WAY down. Buy a lot if you like them that much.  After all was said and done a 4 qt. bowl full of raw greens gave us about 5 cups of cooked greens. 

If you have any good soup recipes that incorporate a little greens, please share!  I'd love to have em.