Broccoli, Carrots and Candle Wax:

What a busy morning it has been!  I did a lot of multi-tasking and I got a lot done.  I printed off 150 pages of research materials for my Early Oregon Series and I started a soup in the crock pot.  I also worked on freezing some veggi's.

It isn't that any of what I did was hard, it was all super easy.  It just took a bit of time.  There is supposed to be a vegetable shortage this year, so the price of vegetables are predicted to go way up.  Before, I would have looked at a 25 lb. bag of carrots for $9.00 and thought, we'll never use those up!  And I wouldn't have bought them, even though they were really cheap. I am now trying to figure out how to preserve vegetables without waiting for the summer harvest and driving out to the farm.  I want to do this on my terms.  Like always.

One three pound bag of broccoli florets from Costco cost me around $4.00 last week.  I decided to blanch and freeze them, and see how much that would give me:

Way so easy!  First, steam them for about 5 minutes.

Second, put a quart sized Ziplock Freezer bag in a bowl to help steady the bag.  Fill the bag up with the hot broccoli.  Man, look at those tongs!  I guess I should use a bit of Stain Bully on them too.

That big bag gave me four little bags.  I let them cool off for a bit, and then sealed them, squeezing the air out as I went.  If I wasn't out of gallon-sized Ziplocks, I would have placed the smaller bags inside of the gallon bag.  But I think they will be just fine this way too.

Remember those carrots from last week ... the 12.5 pounds that I dehydrated?  I showed them to you the other day, but this is how they turned out:

  
Well, this morning I decided to go ahead and slice and freeze the other 12.5 lbs of carrots that were leftover:

I did everything the same as I did with the broccoli ... steamed, packed and then put everything into the freezer:

I don't know about you, but I think that these look much yummier than the dehydrated ones do.  They do take up more room though.

As I was doing the veggi thing, and keeping my printing project going, I was melting the wax from our old candles and filling up jam jars with the wax.  I still don't have any wicks, but it is easy enough to melt these back down and stick wicks into them:

Here is the link to a post I did last April about the ins-and-outs of this little project:  Melting and Re-Using Candle Wax


Have a wonderful day, and God bless!

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