Monday, October 24, 2011

Freezing the Malabar Spinach Harvest

Last week there were rumors of impending chance of frost, so I hightailed it out back to the garden and harvested a good bit of the malabar spinach.  Malabar spinach is a vining leafy plant that I think originated  in India, and thus tolerates our extremely hot and humid summers, as well as drought conditions.  The small leaves do well in salads as fresh greens, and the larger leaves take the place of spinach in cooked or wilted recipes.  And it will seed itself, which makes it a wonderful economically efficient plant!
I pulled out the thick mid stems of the larger leaves, and then blanched them for a minute or so in my big stock pot of boiling water, drained and packed into quart size freezer bags.
As you see, that huge pile of leaves blanched down into 5 freezer bags.  We ended up not getting a frost, and I still have a lot growing in the garden.  I'll try to harvest some more this week.

2 comments:

March97 said...

My spinach looks like this except the stem is green. I've a ton of it. Thanks for the recipe.

Kcalpesh said...

I'm growing this. The last lot started seeding very soon. Any way to delay the seeding? I mean how to keep getting more leaves before the plant really starts growing seeds.