Last Call for Corn

Fall is here.  Summer is over.  But can we eat well once summer is gone?  Yes, that is a resounding yes!  And a great way to keep eating well once the harvest has ended is by preserving the harvest now.

The last sweet corn of the season will soon be harvested, but it can be enjoyed for the next year until a new harvest begins by simply buying and cooking a bit extra right now.  Find a local farmer, and buy 3-4 times as much as you’d like to eat for one or two meals.

The easiest way to preserve all that extra corn is by freezing it.  Simply cook the corn the way you would normally cook it, but shorten the cooking time to roughly half.  For us that means cooking it about five minutes.  And make sure to leave a few cobs of corn in the water for the full cooking time to eat while you’re working on this project.

Then trim the kernels off the cob with a knife.  Aimee from Simple bites recommends using a bundt cake pan to support the cob and catch the kernels that fall down.  Once you have collected enough corn spread them out on baking sheets and freeze them (or skip this step and go straight to bags, we do this extra step so they don’t all freeze together).   Once frozen transfer the corn to large freezer bags labeled with the year.  Stick them in the freezer and that’s it!  Now you can enjoy local sweet corn all year!

Oh and don’t make our mistake and toss the cobs until you’ve used them to make corn stock!  There are tons of recipes on the internet for this, including Aimee’s, but here are the basics:

• 1 onion, chopped a bit
• 5-10 (or more) corn cobs
• 2 (or more) quarts of water
• Spices and herbs if you want

Simmer for 45 minutes, then strain and save the broth for soup!  Freeze it if you want, or you could can it so it doesn’t take up freezer space.  Yes, as I’ve said before you totally can can soup!

Now, if you still have energy then you can be a good prepper and freeze some peppers!  Or can some salsa.  What about peach salsa.  There’s lots to do….