What to do when you are gifted with a huge box of veggies!







 Ok Veggies are not junk guys, I know that.  I was recently gifted two boxes of various fall vegetables.  They were not perfect or the most pretty but they were all fresh and edible.  It is amazing to live in an area where food is plentiful and people are generous with what they themselves can't use.  The three images above are what I was gifted this week.

I thought about making soup but then something in my brain said "make stewed veggies"  No, I'm not hearing things :)




I didn't have a specific recipe so I don't have a specific recipe to share with you.  What I did was google stewed green tomatoes.  There are a lot of recipes online but I noticed they had some things in common:

1) they all added spices
2) they all added a bit of sugar
3) many of them added green pepper
4) many of them added onions





So I started chopping the green tomatoes and the ripe tomatoes up.  Then I decided to add onions and carrots which were in my fridge.  After all that chopping I looked in the boxes and decided I should also add the wilting green peppers and the cucumbers.  My friend had already told me that the cucumbers were quite bitter so I figured adding them to the stewed vegetable would be a great way to use them.  I also added most of the zucchini but kept the biggest one for something else.


What I added to my green tomatoes and ripe tomatoes:
1) onions, I added 8 because that is what my onion bag had in it 
2) minced garlic, 4tbsp because it seemed about right but you can add as much or as little as you like or even whole cloves of garlic
3) carrots, I added about 10 because again, that's what my bag had in it
4) 4 smallish cucumbers that were gifted with the tomatoes
5) 3 smallish zucchini that were also gifted with the tomatoes
6) dried oregano, honestly I just dumped some in :) (Sorry Phil!!!, my hubby gets very frustrated that I don't measure my ingredients so I can duplicate the recipes we like, fair enough, I will try to remember to measure! :))
7) celery salt, normally I would use celery seed but I bought celery salt by accident so I used that, 2 tbsp
8) chicken soup base for some added flavour, you can leave this out, it does add sodium and some other weird chemicals to your food but we like the flavour so I added some. I added a tbsp to a cup of boiling water then dumped it over the veggies.


Originally I was using my slow cooker to stew these but I quickly realize it wasn't big enough.  So I pulled out my big turkey roaster and googled slow cooker temps.  I found out that most slow cookers use 150 F for their low setting and between 250 and 300 F for their high setting.  That's 65C to 150C for those of you who use metric.  I am Canadian so I really should be used to metric cooking temps but I tend to use both depending on what I am cooking.  I suppose because I read a lot of recipes created by American bloggers I tend to think in F for food lol.


I put some in a mason jar, I only had one left and I didn't can it properly because I will be using it up in the next day or so.  For the rest I used Co-op Centcibles small freezer bags and an empty and washed diced tomato can.


I chose a diced tomato can on purpose because I am already used to cooking with canned tomatoes and am pretty good at estimating how many cans I will need for something.  The small freezer bags fit perfectly and are really cheap to buy.



I ended up with 11 bags plus the mason jar.  The last bag wasn't quite full but it was close enough that I will just use it as normal.  These are all in my deep freeze.  Since I have a larger family they will probably be gone in the next 2 months.

There was a secondary recipe to go along with the stewed veggies.  I used all the scraps and peels to make some vegetable stock.





For the stock I simply put all the scraps which were clean and in good shape including the seeds, tops and peels, into my instant pot.  I added the same spices to them as I added to the stewed vegetable but in much smaller quantities.  Then I filled my instant pot with water to the max line.  I set it for soup/broth and set it for 80 minutes.  I don't know why I chose 80 minutes, it just seemed like a reasonable amount of time for veggie broth.  I let it release naturally and then unplugged it and let it cool.  I ended up with 5 - 650ml mason jars full of broth.  My mason jars were upcycled from Classico spaghetti sauce so that was a win also.  Since my town does not recycle glass I try to buy things in cans or mason jars so I can reuse them.  My kids all use jars as glasses, especially my son who's preferred glass is a large pickle jar!

Thanks for stopping by :)

Have a great day from Tracy K. and remember Kindness Matters.


Comments

  1. Tracy, if there is one thing I am moody about, its cooking. Its only during the month of Ramadan (the month when all Muslims fast) that I get a boost to cook all sorts of goody dishes. Otherwise, I'll just cook one or two dishes. Its a wonder how you managed to make such a huge amount of veggie stew !! Kudos to you Girl !!

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