Blanch them!

What do you do when you can buy 20 lbs of baby carrots for $5.80? Blanch, and freeze them! Target had their Green Giant baby carrots for sale for $1.29/lb last week. I also had a $1.00 target coupon, which can be printed as many times as you want. This made each 1 lb. bag $0.29!! The thing is: we just don't eat that many carrots.

So I went to the wonderful world of knowledge: Google. Type in"freeze carrots", and it gives you roughly 854,000 results. Usually the first page or two will have the answer to any question you might have. I found out that in order to preserve the freshness of a carrot, while frozen, it needs to be blanched. Blanching kills the enzyme that breaks down vitamins and nutrients over time.

I bought 20 bags of carrots right before I left to LA, and then ran out of time. Today, I finally decided to move Blanching to the top of my priority list. I got out all the bowls I own, my whole ice-maker bucket thing, and other necessary tools. Here's what you need to do if you ever end up with 20 lbs of carrots in your fridge

1. Boil a large pot of water, and dump some carrots in (I did 2 lbs at a time). They only need to blanch for about 5 minutes
2. Take them out of the boiling water, and dump them into a bowl with ice water. Keep adding more ice, as the ice melts - 5 minutes again -- By the way, it took ALL the ice from my ice maker to do 14lbs of carrots
3. Drain them in a strainer
4. Dry them with a towel
5. Put them in freezer ziplocks, or better yet, into Foodsaver bags. My poor Foodsaver was used a few times right after purchased but then hasn't been used for probably 5 years. Each time I was decluttering I thought about getting rid of that thing, and now I was sure glad I hadn't.
6. Realize that you should be more creative than just freezer carrots, and decide to make "Crockpot Sunday dinner packets".
   
7. Be bummed that you don't have any potatoes, and that you'll have to wait 3 days until your next trip into town.

So the end result is 6 baggies in their nice Foodsaver baggies, and 2 big ziplock bags full of blanched carrots, back in the fridge... waiting for their potato companions. And the other 6 lbs? We had clam chowder tonight, the kids bring them to school as snacks, I snack on them, and we still have 2lbs of fresh carrots in the fridge.