thoughtful consumption

Today I went through my freezer to make a list of what we had. Turns out we’ve got a lot. I want to get through it over the next few months. I think that will mean a lot of vegetable soup and fruit muffins. Not a horrible fate, I suppose.

Here’s what we have that came from the CSA over the past year…

The first few things are prepared frozen things. We’ve already eaten 1 lb of mushroom pasta for a quick supper. It was just fine. I’m also defrosting 2 quarts of the soup. Before we make more soup, I guess we need to eat up what’s there.

Here’s the plan over the course of the next few months for the rest.

First, the fruit…

• apple pie
• blueberry-cream cheese rolls (take crescent roll dough, spread out the squares, top with cream cheese and blueberries, fold the corners in, bake till fabulous)
• apple muffins or quick bread cooked with apple butter
• peach muffins cooked with apple butter
• apple butter-cream cheese rolls?

Moving on to vegetables…

• Pesto pasta whenever possible. Pesto goes further on pasta than you think. If you put it on hot pasta, the oil in the pesto coats the pasta really well. I hope to get three meals for two or three out of this pesto.
• The breaded okra is for frying. I’ve read that you can fry it frozen. When it gets closer to that time, I’ll do some more research.
• Hopefully the stir-fried zucchini will reheat nicely. I’ll defrost it in the microwave and then heat it in a pan. This is sort of a test run. It’s our favorite summer squash dish, and if it reheats well, I’ll freeze more this coming season.
• The spaghetti squash will probably end up in something like zucchini bread.
• The blanched greens will be defrosted for spinach dip or an alfredo pasta dish.
• 4 sweet potato pies!
• So that leaves the green beans. Some of these guys will end up in vegetable soup. (In addition to these green beans, I have a bunch of store bought frozen vegetables I want to use up.) Some of the beans I’ll cook to death southern-style for my husband. I like green beans sautéed lightly but I’m not sure how well frozen beans will do with that. So I may try it and then repurpose them for soup if they don’t turn out so well.