Preserve It or Lose It! Preparing for Winter + Update on My Surgery

Hello everyone. I am so happy to see you again. Well, the weather here in New York's Hudson Valley has suddenly turned quite chilly and I have no idea when our first frost will be, but I suspect it will be earlier this year. So today I want to take some time to harvest the leeks and the the parsley and the celery from my garden. And then we will clean and preserve all of that produce. But before we head outside, I need to make lunch. And I'm going to do kind of a keto lunch, cold cuts with coleslaw. And the first thing I need to do is make the dressing for the coleslaw. And I'm going to make it in my new old favorite bowl. This is the bowl that you and I bought together on one of our thrifting trips. It's a 1950s Pyrex bowl and I love it. So I have mayonnaise here, better have this handy. Then I want rice vinegar. I know some people put apple cider vinegar in their coleslaw, but I don't really care for apple cider vinegar. And the rice vinegar is very mild. I also want just the tiniest amount of honey. That's enough. And I need some salt and pepper, also known as pepper. Whisk. This is tri-color or three-color coleslaw. So it's green cabbage, purple cabbage, and carrots. It's a convenience item because I don't always feel like making coleslaw from scratch. Mix. And I may have mentioned this before, but I'm having surgery on my hip in a few weeks. So trying to stay more or less low carb for a while because I'm sure excess weight is not helpful after hip surgery. And this is definitely a low carb lunch. And for the cold cuts, see my spouse picked up a bunch of cold cuts for me. This is something, something roast beef. I'll do three slices. My dog is at my feet. Do you think you deserve a piece of roast beef? I think you do. I'm going to cut this roast beef into thin strips and the first strip goes to my dog. She caught it mid-air. In the comments let me know if you've ever had hip surgery or knee surgery. Tell me what it was like because I have no idea what to expect. But I know that I will probably be out of commission for a bit. I will try to keep filming videos, of course, but I don't think I will be able to spend much time in the garden. So it's really good for me to get this bit of gardening done today. There's one other ingredient I want to add to this. Toasted sesame oil. Just a splash. If you need a low-carb lunch in your keto repertoire, make this. Super, super delicious. And it's made all the better from the sesame oil. I'm going to finish my lunch and then we will head outside. I wanted to jump in here to say that if you watch all of my videos you may notice that this particular episode is out of sequence. We actually filmed this video two weeks ago. Right now we are filming videos ahead of time so that you can enjoy a new episode each week even during the week of my hip surgery and that surgery is scheduled for October 16th. Here in the kitchen garden, I'm harvesting the largest of the leeks that you and I grew together from seed. We can let the smaller leeks continue to grow. I will also harvest the few flowers that remain in the garden. It's autumn now, and the flowers are definitely finished in this garden, but I will try to make a very small arrangement with these few stems. On to the celery. I planted the seedlings too closely together and as a result some of them developed fungal issues but most of the celery is perfectly fine. I will only harvest the perfectly fine celery. Here is the parsley. I won't harvest all of it today but I will harvest enough to dry and jar up for winter use. Parsley is one of my favorite herbs. I use it in almost every savory dish. Finally, I see some decent sized green peppers that we can harvest. Afterwards, we will return to the kitchen. I'm actually stunned at the harvest we got today. So even though most of my celery wasn't usable, I have plenty that is. I have beautiful leeks. The smaller leeks I'm going to let just continue to grow. And I even got a few flowers that we can arrange. So I have a big pot of water coming to a boil behind me. And while we wait for that water to boil, I'm going to go ahead and arrange the flowers. So I think this will be our very final flower arrangement that uses flowers from my own garden. And I didn't have many flowers, so I doubt the arrangement will impress anyone. Nevertheless, I will be happy to have these flowers. Well, this is kind of pitiful, but I'm still happy to have the flowers. We're going to set you right over here. Let me clean up. This flower was too far gone, so I'm going to clean up my little mess here, and then I need to wash all of the produce, and we can start to preserve it. So the first item I'm going to deal with is the celery, because it has to be blanched, meaning boiled for a certain amount of thyme and then plunged into ice water. I am going to save almost all of my celery leaves for stock. The leaves don't have to be blanched. You can just freeze them as is. I will, however, wash them first. Put another towel over these celery leaves. I'm going to set these aside to let them dry a little before I bag them up and pop them into the freezer. I'm putting any bad-looking leaves in my bowl over here. Now I can cut up and wash the celery stems, or the celery ribs they're called. I think the stalk is the entire plant, and one stem from that stalk is called a rib. It's a very crisp celery, and that's a good thing. Now, I did wash the bench scraper. I know I used it earlier. You should eat one of these bits of celery. Oh, it's good. Sometimes garden-grown celery can be very strong in flavor. This is very mild, just like the celery you would buy at the supermarket. I have to check because I don't remember how long I'm supposed to blanch celery. Two minutes, and then I will set a timer for two minutes once this water returns to a boil. Oh also I need to gather my ice water. Well this is hardly a year's supply of celery but I'm happy to have it. Better some celery than no celery. And I'm just placing this on a towel now. Then I will pat it dry, flash freeze it, and then I will vacuum seal it. I could have done a better job of cutting the celery into more uniform slices, but I'm not going to bother with that. And this goes into the freezer. Next job is the parsley, and my plan is to wash dry in the food processor, and then I will place it on a baking tray to let it dry completely. Parsley dries very quickly. I mean, you don't need food dehydrator for thin leaves like parsley, which I don't. And it's okay to include the parsley stems. Now I have rinsed and all I need to do is dry the parsley. I need to fetch my food processor and here it is. I think this is going to make at least a year supply of dried parsley for me. I should probably do this in a couple of batches. Batch number two. Nice thing about using the food processor is that if you have some stems in with your leaves, the stems will be chopped very finely and then they will dry easily. You need a spatula. Yes, this will definitely amount to a year's supply of chopped or minced dried parsley for me. And it's free because I grew the herb. those little tiny jars of dried parsley are hideously expensive. And this goes into a preheated 170 degree Fahrenheit oven for about 20 minutes, and then I would give the leaves a toss, and if they're not completely dried just yet, then I will add another 10 minutes or so. But the leaves should dry very quickly. Do a little cleanup here, and then I think we should tackle the leeks. Okay, actually, before we do the leeks, I want to give this parsley a quick toss. It was in the oven for 20 minutes and it's almost dry. I think it's going to need another 10 to 15 minutes. Back to the oven. All right, all of my leeks are washed. I may remove some of the outer leaves depending on what they look like. Otherwise, preserving leeks is a very straightforward job. You just clean them really well, slice them into rounds or dice them, and then freeze. I already removed the roots. We're up in the garden. I cut off the tough, most of the tough upper leaves. And of course, you can save those for stock, but I already have a ton of tough leek leaves in my freezer reserved for stock. Transfer some of these leeks to a bowl. In case I didn't mention it, Those smaller leeks that are up in my garden will remain there until they grow bigger. And I'm probably not going to be able to go up to that garden, at least not immediately after my surgery. So maybe I will ask a friend to go up and harvest them. These can go right into a bag. Leek 2026. I'll do two bags. The reason I didn't stuff all of the leeks into one bag is because I want the bags to lay flat in the freezer. It takes up less room that way. To the freezer. I need to bring my leftover parsley stems and the bits of leeks that we didn't use up to my composter. I'm making my own compost. I will tell you, in a year when so much of the produce I planted didn't perform well, I am grateful that my peppers performed exceedingly well. We already preserved some of the fully ripened, meaning red bell peppers, in a previous episode. We also made, with those peppers, a red bell pepper soup and, oh, and the most glorious red bell pepper pasta sauce. I still dream about that pepper pasta sauce. So if you missed either of those videos, I hope you will go back and watch them. Another check of the parsley before we start cutting up peppers. This looks like it's not a very stable surface, is it? Excuse me, my oven is asking me to acknowledge it. Yeah, this still needs a few more minutes. So these frozen peppers will be just great for things like chili, and of course pizza, and various soups and stews. If you have a great recipe that uses bell peppers please tell me about it in the comments section below, especially if that recipe involves green bell peppers. And I just thought of something. The reason I'm cutting these peppers into strips rather than dicing them is because I might want to use them in fajitas. So far from the 2026 garden and also the 2026 farmer's market, we have preserved quite a bit of food. See we did blueberries, we did strawberry jam, we did local corn. These are all in the freezer by the way. We did potatoes, which are not in the freezer. They're in the cool dark cellar. We froze onions and we turned homegrown garlic into garlic pucks that we froze and and then we will add what we harvested today the peppers the celery leaves the celery stems what else did we do we just did them uh leeks so we are heading into 2027 in pretty good shape i would say of course we also made and canned of vegetable stock and chicken stock so that's all ready to go and I will probably make and can another batch of vegetable stock next month. Let me know what you are busy harvesting and preserving these days. Also let me know if you like to can or to dehydrate or to freeze dry your harvest. I don't have a freeze dryer and I know they are quite the investment but maybe one day I will obtain one. I'm only flash freezing these because I don't want them to clump together and after they've been frozen then I can transfer them to Ziploc bags. Now I have the eight million or thereabouts celery leaves we need to bag up. And again, I'm going to use these for stock. Now, I can really stuff these bags full with these celery leaves because, again, they're going to be used for stock. I will have to do a freezer organizing video because, as you just saw, my freezer is in dire need of organizing. It was organized at one point, but you know what happens. life gets in the way. I just pulled everything out of the freezer and the parsley out of the oven. Lizette walked into the kitchen and said, holy cow, what a sea of green. And that's true. Everything we did today, with the exception of this hint of red from the bell peppers, is verdant. But look at everything we accomplished today. We have two gallon-sized bags of homegrown leeks. We have two gallon-sized bags of celery leaves, which again are for stock. We've got two trays of green bell peppers and one single red bell pepper. We have a whole tray of parsley from the garden. And again, this will last me a whole year. And we have the celery from the garden. And I want to thank you so much for hanging out with me today as we went about harvesting and preserving. And I think in the next video, we're going to do a dinner party. I think we are going to do a dinner party. I'm really not sure. But until then, please treat yourself very, very well. And I can't wait to see you again. Bye for now, friends. I have to put all of this back into the freezer.