Thawed peppers great in hash browns!

This worked great!  Definitely do again!

Thawed the peppers that had been frozen raw/whole last year -- 2 green peppers, and several banana/hot peppers.  Thawed them by putting them in a bowl of hot water.  They thawed quickly.

Then sliced them open, removed the seeds, and squeezed them to get most of the liquid out.  Then chopped them and put them in to cook with the hash browns.  

Great!

Freezing raw/whole/plain tomatoes (easy peasy)

Having nearly completely run out of jars and freezer space, decided to try the one thing I NEVER do:  Freeze an actual vegetable instead of making something out of and freezing that.

Google says tomatoes can simply be frozen whole.  No nothing' needed beforehand.  So, I just removed the green stem (but didn't cut in to remove the scabby bit), gave them a quick soapy wash in the sink, put them on the counter to dry, then put them on a plate in the freezer.  Once frozen, into a bag they went, and sucked out the excess air.

Soooooo easy, and so nice to take a break from ALL. THE. COOKING. that I've been doing in recent months.

Should be easy peasy to later take them out and use them for new batches of minestrone, lentil tomato soup, bolognese, etc., sometime over the winter.

Ice, ice, baby. Defrosting the freezer!

It's been a few years coming.  Finally this winter I ate almost all the way through the freezer, and have been deliberately holding off on from my next frozen-packaged-meal spending spree.  So today I moved the last of the contents into the fridge freezer, opened the drain and placed a few rags there, and unplugged it.  Will keep the lid closed due to the basement spider situation.

Freezing swiss chard

2 chard-freezing experiments on the go. 

1st experiment:  Cut into large pieces, blanched briefly, then soaked in ice water for a few minutes.  Then rolled into a few balls and froze in ziploc bag.

2nd experiment (did this one today):  No blanching.  Rinsed off the raw leaves, then let them dry off in the sun in the kitchen, flipping them half way through.  Cut out the stems, then chopped the leaves into quite small pieces, ~1/2" or so.  Froze.

Haven't yet tried unfreezing/cooking with them.