Super easy, we don’t even blanch. We grow like 20lbs of bush beans, cut tips and tails and chunk to an inch or so long, freeze in bags. Toss straight into a soup or stir fry from frozen. Same for beet tops when we harvest the beets, rinse and chop the tops into packable size, dump into just about anything and they are like fresh.
Some vegetables just do not freeze though, no salads of course, only the kinds that you cook.
I rarely buy fresh fruits except for apples these days as they are always poor quality here, and frozen are excellent and far cheaper. Especially berry type fruit like cherries, blueberries, strawberries etc as they go straight from the field to the freezer plant when they are ripe unlike the supermarket crap.
We keep our own apples in the fridge and cellar, same with carrots, beets, potatoes. Onions hang in the basement. Crabapples we have a huge bounty of and core and quarter and freeze, they are great in a fruit smoothie, pie, applesauce etc.
I would highly recommend an upright freezer over a chest aside from secondary bulk meat storage. I have both, the upright you can select your food much better instead of just eating what’s on top. Everyone says they will dig in the chest, NOBODY DOES. Modern uprights have similar efficiency and power failure performance, and nothing ends up freezer burnt at the bottom.
Super easy, we don’t even blanch. We grow like 20lbs of bush beans, cut tips and tails and chunk to an inch or so long, freeze in bags. Toss straight into a soup or stir fry from frozen. Same for beet tops when we harvest the beets, rinse and chop the tops into packable size, dump into just about anything and they are like fresh.
Some vegetables just do not freeze though, no salads of course, only the kinds that you cook.
I rarely buy fresh fruits except for apples these days as they are always poor quality here, and frozen are excellent and far cheaper. Especially berry type fruit like cherries, blueberries, strawberries etc as they go straight from the field to the freezer plant when they are ripe unlike the supermarket crap.
We keep our own apples in the fridge and cellar, same with carrots, beets, potatoes. Onions hang in the basement. Crabapples we have a huge bounty of and core and quarter and freeze, they are great in a fruit smoothie, pie, applesauce etc.
I would highly recommend an upright freezer over a chest aside from secondary bulk meat storage. I have both, the upright you can select your food much better instead of just eating what’s on top. Everyone says they will dig in the chest, NOBODY DOES. Modern uprights have similar efficiency and power failure performance, and nothing ends up freezer burnt at the bottom.