You can freeze everything

First, my disclaimer:  I'm no food expert.

Freezing food is great, especially if you didn't get around to canning anything this year.  Like maybe you had a baby right around the time the whole canning season rolled around...or something.  It was always my plan to go big on canning once we had a garden, but it didn't happen for me this year.  However, our garden was still kind of planned around canning in future years.  We had 6 tomato plants.  And I don't even like tomatoes (in their unaltered form- I love salsa, red sauce, ketchup, etc.). 

My mom totally saved the day when she told me you can freeze whole uncooked tomatoes.  You just wash the tomatoes, cut off the top, and stick them in a freezer bag. Awesome, right?  I had no idea.  They're great for using in sauces and soups, apparently.  You can even use them in fresh salsa in the winter, but you need to make sure that those frozen tomatoes are blemish free, since you're not cooking out any possible germs. 

{These will be sauce.}

Another of my recent favorites when it comes to freezing food: pesto.  I know you can freeze fresh herbs (though I've never done it), so it made sense that you could freeze the finished pesto.  I especially love it when I'm making a creamy pesto sauce, because it removes half the process.  I should have done this with more of my basil before it all flowered.

{I freeze it flat, breast milk style.  It makes thawing it so fast.}

Your own pie crust.  The pie crust recipe I use makes 5 single crusts.  I don't often need that much at once, so I freeze it like they do in the store- I roll it out on top of wax paper, then roll it up.  I wrap that in saran wrap, then aluminum foil.  Another way to freeze it- if you have any of those disposable pie plates, you can lay the dough in those, trim the edges, and seal it up with saran wrap.  They don't take as long to defrost as the rolled up ones.

{They remind me of Christmas crackers.}

As well as freezing this stuff, I also froze broccoli and cauliflower.  We planted more than we could eat fresh, so I just blanched the excess and stuck it in freezer bags.  

That's most of my new freezer-ing.  I need to go check out the frozen foods aisle for more ideas.