Monday Meals-Freezing Spinach

Multiply this amount by 4 bath towels!  That's how much turned into 9 quart jars of spinach.

I bought a crate of spinach for $30 from my local CSA.  My idea was that I'd buy in bulk and try to freeze most of it for later consumption.  I'm trying to figure out a way to have frozen food sans plastic.  I miss buying frozen vegetables.  It was an enormous amount of spinach.  It sat in the fridge for a whole week because I was sick and then convalescing and had to deal with other things with my limited energy.   On Thursday I managed to wash one bag, but didn't get to the rest until Sunday afternoon.

We actually picked it up on Easter afternoon.  So I figured on Easter we'd have spinach salad with our lamb and baked potatoes.  My son in law made a delicious spinach salad off the cuff. To a big salad bowl of washed fresh spinach, he added two chopped up Easter eggs, one thinly sliced apple, threw in some chopped green onion and then tossed it all with a salad dressing made from olive oil, balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard and honey.  It was yummy!

Please ignore the fact that my freezer desperately needs defrosting.  Thank you.*

My plans for freezing are pretty experimental.  I just combined instructions that I found on the internet.  I took some advice from this blog and then other advice from this one.  I didn't blanch the spinach.  That just seemed like too much work!  I picked through it carefully (took forever!), washed it three times in the kitchen sink, spun it dry in batches and then let it sit out on a bath towels for 30 minutes or so to dry as much as possible.  Then I stuffed 9 quart canning jars with the leaves and put them in my freezer.

Even after freezing 9 quart jars of spinach, we still had enough left over to eat as our veggie for dinner last night.  I just steamed it with olive oil, butter and garlic salt.  Also yummy!

*You'll probably notice the chicken in plastic packaging.  At my Whole Foods, for some reason you can get beef, sausages and pre-made things like kebabs just wrapped in compostable butcher paper,  But you have to buy chicken in plastic packaging.  The packaging does say it is recyclable.  I have also been buying my chicken from The Fresh Market, which also has a meat section where you can buy chicken over the counter without packaging.  But they wrap it in butcher paper that is lined with something.  I don't know if it is plastic or silicone or what.  I have a sneaking suspicion it is not compostable.  Anyway, this time I was at Whole Foods and I just didn't have time to go to any other stores, so I just picked this chicken up.  It is really hard to stay plastic free all the time.  I am working on it!