The Freezer - A Girl’s Best Friend!

You may think that a freezer is a strange thing to get excited about – especially on a cold, snowy Colorado evening.  However, when faced with the prospect of feeding a hungry family after a long day, there is something magical about opening the deep freezer and gazing at the rows and rows of summer harvest all carefully put away for times like this.

I love to garden – mostly because I love to cook and eat the results!  This year we grew tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, romano beans, edamame, raspberries, grapes and herbs.  The tomatoes are the core crop in our garden.  We grow a few plants of eating tomatoes (sweet 100 cherry tomatoes and some form of beefsteak for the mandatory summer BLT’s and grilled hamburgers), but the bulk of our crop are Polish plum tomatoes that we grow from seeds that my Dad saves for us every year.  These are no ordinary plum tomatoes.  They weigh an average of 1lb each and are the perfect base for a hearty Bolognese sauce!  Living in Colorado, I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of meat combinations in my sauce.  One of the most successful iterations this year combined Elk, Venison and Pork (along with apple wood smoked bacon and Italian meatballs).   This year we yielded over 80lbs of tomatoes and made 10 large batches of sauce that now line the top shelf of my freezer for just such a night.

Each year we try to scale back on the zucchini and summer squash, but somehow always end up with far more than we know what to do with.  My second and third freezer shelves are mostly dedicated to the many zucchini consuming dishes that I’ve added to my repertoire over the years.  Thank goodness for the Gardener’s Community Cookbook for the entire chapter dedicated to what to do with an over-abundance of zucchini (I’m clearly not the only one with this problem).  I have stewed zucchini, roasted zucchini, zucchini latkes, zucchini soup, zucchini quesadillas, zucchini pancakes, zucchini muffins (these actually have a shelf of their own), and yes, there is zucchini added to my sauce!

We also had a huge grape harvest this year – about 50lbs.  I was too lazy to make jelly this year, but I did make a few gallons of grape juice that also grace my freezer’s third shelf.

So, on this cold night, I was more than happy to heat up some pasta, thaw some sauce and call it dinner!

A few tomatoes getting ready for sauce

Grape juice begins

Sew many projects, sew little time!

Over the New Year's break, I finally got a chance to work on a blue and green version of my yellow and green Riley baby quilt!  I just love seersucker and gingham and had been so looking forward to using them in greens and blues. 

For the pinwheels, I used Deb Tucker's Wing Clipper template - a gift from a very talented quilting friend - and it made a huge difference!  Thank you also to the same friend for encouraging me to use the navy inner border.  I really liked the "pop" of the navy, and the oportunity to add the contrasting white stitching for a fun effect!

Completed Ryan quilt top

Blue gingham pinwheel

Nine patch

Now I just have to find some time to quilt it!