OK, so we want to show you another example of how we try to seek “ready to go” food preservation techniques. We’ve shown quite a few examples of these over the years, but with this one, we’re hoping to help you see how flexible this kind of preservation can be.
Here we have a Lime Basil Cream Sauce, basically a ready to go pasta sauce. It was made with our fresh homegrown ingredients, as much as possible, especially lots and lots of lime basil. At its core, it’s basically pesto, grated parmesan cheese with a bit of cream to turn it into a pasta sauce. Overall, a pretty simple recipe that uses up many cups of basil and one that’d be great just as a regular nightly meal.
Now, you’ll never find this kind of thing in a “preservation focused” book, website or other resource. It’s just now that world rolls. When it comes to things like canning and long term, shelf stable preservation, there are just a lot of rules that need to be followed to render food safe. By focusing entirely on shelf stable, you really limit your options.
Instead, where we’re looking for inspiration are in recipes that are known to freeze well. There’s this whole world of cooking called “freezer cooking” and we have practiced it at various points in our life. The 10 second gist is that it’s about bulk preparing ingredients, making pre-made meals and then freezing them. Typically weeks or a month worth of meals at a time. It’s not just “making leftovers” since the “actual cooking” is usually done when it’s time to make the meal. It’s a great technique for busy moms/dads/couples, single people that want to cook and hate food waste and people that want to reduce the effort of cooking.
Basically, we’re borrowing that exact technique as a way of using up some of our harvests. But, instead of making weeks worth of food, we’re focusing on one or two recipes at a time that use up specific ingredients. We can then pull these out on those busy weeknights and the “gourmet, home made and hard part” of the meal is all ready done. We just have to thaw a jar in the fridge, boil some water and make pasta like you would with a store bought sauce. We’re basically trading when we do have time and fresh ingredients for when we don’t.
All sorts of things can be frozen. In fact, many recipes these days often talk about freezing as an option. Or, maybe someone in the recipe’s comments tried it. Sure, not everything under the sun can be successfully frozen, thawed and then cooked like this, but a surprising number of ingredients and full blown recipes can be. Even a home made, gourmet cream based pasta sauce!
What’s really cool with this kind of preservation is you can easily modify things to suit your taste and culinary knowledge. As long as you’re not “fundamentally” changing the recipe, there’s nothing “food safety” or “freezer safe” wise to check. We could easily and safely modify the base recipe with some “cool stuff” we know about pesto and cream based pasta sauces. And, as expected, it pops with flavor and home grown goodness!
As we’ve shifted our preservation more and more towards freezing, it has meant we needed more freezer space. In the grand scheme of things, freezers are pretty cheap to both acquire and operate. This coming from people that have many, many hundreds of dollars locked up into canning equipment! These days, that canning gear only get used maybe a few times a year. But our freezers are doing some seriously heavy lifting and we eat better for it!
And lastly, for the curious, yes you can freeze food in canning jars. The key is to leave good head space, just like you would with canning. We typically leave at least 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch to allow for expansion, which happens during the freezing process. But, this recipe would freeze just as well in a flat packed freezer Ziplock bag!
