Maybe the “freezing things” post should appear in summer, at the moment when I’m stuffing my farmer’s market booty into Ziplocks for long term storage. But it’s now, in the dark days of winter, when the dark earthy flavors of parsnips & turnips & potatoes are all that’s to be had in the greenmarket produce bins, that the work put in to putting food by pays off. That I now can have the bright & sweet flavors of summer, teleported to me as if by magic across fall and winter and into the late winter days of March, is a delight bordering on the miraculous, well worth small labor it took to pack these foods away.

Berries were the easiest: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, each in their turn as they hit their peak of flavor and abundance over the summer months. Patted dry after a quick wash, they’re spread in a single layer onto a baking sheet (so they’ll remain individual berries, rather than becoming a giant berry clump), then covered in plastic wrap and set in the freezer. In the morning they’re solid as pebbles, and they get poured into a giant-sized ziplock bag with whatever berries went in the week before; I didn’t bother to batch or measure these out, or to separate the blue from the black from the rasp. In the end I was quite happy with my pillow-sized mixed bag of multicolored iced-berry nuggets. They would’ve worked great in muffins or pancakes, but I’m pretty sure that all of them went, handful by frozen handful, into my morning breakfast cereal, turning the milk purple as they thawed and extending my tart summer berry fix of all the way to December.

For some, an additional minimal bit of processing was needed. The blackberries were quartered to keep them in line with their smaller blueberry and raspberry cousins. The strawberries were hulled, and some were halved or quartered, although for some reason that I can no longer fathom, I left an entire batch of them whole, and I now have a quart bag’s worth of rock-hard, walnut-sized strawberries that I have no idea what to do with. Will they endure a spin in the blender?

Maybe I had some plan for those much-larger-than-bite-sized strawberries when I bagged them in June, but now months later that plan is lost to me. Most of the time when I freeze things I communicate much better with my future self about exactly what is in that bag, how much of it there is, and when it went into the freezer, writing these coordinates with a sharpie onto the ziplock’s white patch. Maybe this was unnecessary for the sweetcorn, which to this day has kept its unmistakable sunshine-yellow color and has never dulled into the unrecognizable frozen-substance color that food usually takes on in the freezer, but I marked each bag anyway if only to distinguish between the 1/2 cup and one-cup portions. Freezing the corn was more involved than the simpler-than-simple berries, but not by much. The corn was shucked, blanched for a minute or two in boiling water, then cut off the cob into big golden mounds. These were scooped up into half-cup and one-cup portions and placed into the marked ziplocks (nota bene: always label the bags first – if you’re as clumsy as me you’ll invariably poke through the bag with your sharpie if you try to write on it after it’s filled). The filled bags were rolled up and stacked onto baking sheets and in the morning, frozen into neat logs, they went into the freezer drawer, from which they emerge from time to time to get added to refried beans, chili (a la Alan Harding), cornbread, or to simply sit dressed with butter and salt alongside a slice of meatloaf, sweet & bright & tender like no canned niblets can ever be.

In the great August tide of greenmarket produce, there’s a swarm of only-in-summer, can’t-get-this-in-the-supermarket flavors, but to me perhaps the iconic, totemic taste of summer is found in tomatoes. I pine all year long for the juicy tart-sweet taste of tomatoes in summer, and to try and have that taste in Winter, I stowed away two quart-sized bags of frozen, whole roma tomatoes. To prepare them for the freezer I blanched them just enough for the skins to slip off — a step that my brother, an inveterate food-freezer, deems unnecessary. He says the skins will slip off easily from the frozen whole tomatoes once they’re thawed; however I took the extra of blanching & peeling for the sake of out-of-the-bag ease when the day comes for them to be turned into sauce. I plan to drop them frozen into a saucepan and cook them down into a marinara or Bolognese sauce — I’m expecting they’ll disintegrate nicely in the pot after their months in a frozen state, and I look forwarding to savoring the as much of the flavor of summer sun as they’ve managed to keep. I’ve been procrastinating this dish though, since I expect it to take up all of my frozen Romas, leaving me to wait until August before I can taste their kind again.

The effort to stash away these treats was minimal, but it made me feel I’d tapped into an ages-old tradition of preserving summer foods of summer for use in winter (yea ok the home freezer is a new twist on the tradition, but the spirit is the same, right?) I like how it lets me sidestep the supermarket, giving my an option beyond the giant food distribution chains that brings me raspberries from Chile or Florida, food bred for travel, not for flavor. My freezer lets me have food grown close to home by a farmer I’ve met, even in winter when nothing grows here.

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