Welcome to week 14 of the CSA season! While we still have several weeks left of tomato and pepper season, now is a great time to think about saving a couple of items for the winter. Peppers are super easy to freeze for the winter - just slice or chop cleaned peppers and toss them in a zip top bag and straight into the freezer. If the thought of making tomato sauce seems like too much work, you have some easier options to save tomatoes. You can freeze tomato puree, or you can even put whole tomatoes straight into the freezer. If you look at recipes for freezing tomato puree they will generally tell you that you need to peel the tomatoes first. It's been our experience that a food processor or blender chops the skins up small enough that you won't notice them in a winter soup, and you'll be so glad for a taste of summer that you can forgive a couple flecks of tomato skin. If you freeze tomatoes, bear in mind that they will release a lot of water when they are defrosted. While frozen tomatoes are a great base for sauce or soup, they will not be a good choice if you want a mid-winter salad topper. Finally, we always try to make a couple batches of pesto with fresh basil before it goes out of season. You can freeze pesto in ice cube trays if you are looking for a smaller size to season a dish with. If you want to preserve just the plain basil flavor to give you some more versatility, you can blend basil and olive oil in a food processor and freeze that.
We have added a bulk basil option in the extras for this week. The bulk option is 2# and will roughly fill a standard grocery bag. If you would like to order extras of anything for freezing feel free to add them to your share through the "extras" option.
