Freezing Lemon Juice

We were given a HUGE bag of lemons a few months ago that we had planned to freeze the juice from.  Well, the weeks -and now months- went by before I got a chance to even pull them out of the bag unless I needed to use one!  Finally, I set the children to work peeling a bunch of them so that we could juice them and freeze it.  They peeled a huge bowl of them and that bowl then sat in the fridge for about a week before I Dale finally juiced them for me one night.  In other words... they lasted forever and still had tons of juice even after sitting in the fridge all unpeeled!  (Thankful for a Husband who continually helps me in these ways too.)

Initially I was going to use ice cube traysbut can you believe I dont have a single one!  I went to buy some but then as I thought about it more, I decided I wanted to freeze the juice in 1-lemon servings.  Ice cube trays are an ounce or less per square and an average lemon (or recipe calling for the 'juice of 1 lemon') is 2 ounces.  Hmm. What to do...

I finally decided to juice them and freeze the juice in jelly jars-which I have a lot of- and then pop the juice out of the jars, put them in baggies and back into the freezer.  It worked great!!

The Great American Fruit Tree Campaign will have full details on how I froze my juice soon so here are just a couple of pictures to hold you over and give you an idea how you could do it too.

(We peeled the lemons; sliced in half cross-ways -revealing the seeds; picked out some of the seeds but not all; and then juiced in our juicer.This gave us lots more juice than hand squeezing but even doing it by hand would be worth the effort!)

Bowl of lemons. The smaller ones are the ones given to us by friends and that we just juiced. The large ones are Meyer Lemons -those are up next!

2 oz/ 1 lemon 'cubes'

Baggie of frozen lemon juice cubes!

Freezing Squash

Kroger had a great price on Organic Butternut Squash ($2.99 each and they were huge) so I grabbed a bunch -eating some now but also wanting to preserve some for later.  I decided to freeze three of them and thought I would share how I did it so you can see how simple it is.  Anytime you have extra veggies that you wont be able to use before they spoil (or a great deal like this), simply freeze or otherwise preserve the extras and you will save money as well as adding to your 'emergency' food supplies.

The 3 I chose to freeze

First peel off the outer skin.  You may need to go over the squash twice in order to get all of the skin off.  See the color difference here?  You want the lighter color all removed so all you have is the deep yellow flesh left.  

(No idea why these two pictures are backwards!?)  

Cut in half (pic below) and then cut off the stem end (above).

Cut the top section in half, slice into crescents, and then dice into pieces.  

Slice the bottom in half revealing the seed section.  

Using a large spoon, scoop out the seeds and pulp.

I saved the seeds to eat later.  (Rinse and soak overnight in salty water then dehydrate or bake until crisp -yummy!)

 Slice off the bottom end

Cut the blossom/hard portion off and save the side pieces.  (Its all about saving every bit you can!)

Again,slice into strips and then dice into pieces.   

The container of diced squash pieces.  

I wanted mine in 4c portions as that will be about 1 meal for my family.  

You can freeze them in ziploc bags if you only want to freeze them for a few months. (Up to 6.)

Or you can vacuum seal them and they will remain fresh for years in the freezer.  (I love our FoodSaver-Jarden GameSaver Silver but even the more basic FoodSaver - GameSaver would be great!)

(Note I recommend labeling your bags BEFORE you put the squash in them -sure is hard to write on those chunks of squash in those bags!)  

If you prefer, you can also cook the squash chunks, mash them and then add them to ziploc bags for freezing.  I may go back to Kroger and get a few more if they still have the sale and do that.  We love butternut squash mashed and cooked with lots of yummy butter and sea salt!

Look what is set back up!

I have lots I want to share soon in the food preservation area. Freezing, dehydrating, and hopefully some canning. In looking through preparedness and survival packages, it will be a lot cheaper to buy own own organic produce and preserve it ourselves than to buy the non-organic already prepared stuff!

Lots (hopefully) coming soon!

Also, please visit www.GAFTCampaign.com and bookmark her site. Will be doing some guest posting but there is also tons of great stuff there.

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