Good morning, and blessings to you on this beautiful Sunday! Today I am going to continue on with my food preservation series. This year I had a friend who was gracious enough to let me garden with her as I did not have my spot ready at my house in town. We had a lot of success with some of our veggies but some not so good. We were very disappointed that our green beans did not do well. We planted them twice and they just did not come up, after a 3rd planting we got plants. This is the produce I got in one day picking. I will be showing how I put up all those lovely green peppers...

Peppers are one of the easiest things to freeze. You don't have to blanch them, so basically I just clean them and cut them up however I want. Then I put them in whatever container I want to freeze them in. This year I chose to use my Food Saver, and chopped some of the peppers and cut some into strips. I put about 1/2 cup of the chopped peppers in each before I sealed it. This is what most of my cooked recipes call for, and I did about 1 1/2 cups of the strips for stir fry and pepper steak. 

This time around I ended up with about 10 packages of peppers. I had harvested peppers another time and got about the same amount. I feel pretty set for the winter now. Next came the green beans. There weren't very many so I froze this batch of green beans as I like frozen beans for soups. I freeze green beans basically the same as corn. So if you read that post this might seem repetitive. Here is what I started with.(Sorry for the blurry picture)

Then I had to blanch them. I blanch green beans for 2 minutes. The same as corn, start timing after you put the beans in the water and they come to a boil. 

Then put them into an ice water bath, for the same amount of time. This will stop them from cooking and retain the nutrients in them. I did this for another 2 minutes.
 

When the beans were done cooling I put them in Ziploc freezer bags and labeled them. I used 3 cups in each bag as we use a lot of beans and my whole family likes them as a side dish. Add a little bacon and onions when you cook them, mmmm! We LOVE green beans!

So I ended up with 7 packages, and that should do nicely. I also canned some from another source and will tell you about that later. I am off to clean my back porch, have a great day everyone.