Make it Monday: 28 POUNDS of ASPARAGUS

I promise I am not crazy!  Well....we'll just leave it at that.  HAHA!  I recently bought 28 lbs. of Asparagus from Bountiful Baskets.  If you haven't bought from BB you SHOULD!  They have incredible produce for a very reasonable cost, a lot of it is locally grown, or grown from small farmers in other countries (because we don't really grow all that Mexico can grow right?!)  I paid under $1.00 per pound for this asparagus...WOW!!!! Just for the record I LOVE ASPARAGUS, my kids love asparagus, my hubby.....well he isn't apposed to it (did I mention he only ate like 5 things when we got married? more on that another day).  But still 28lbs of asparagus is a little intimidating.  At first I thought, well we could just eat it with everything....realistic? probably not.  Then I thought I'd give some away and what not.  So I googled it and found that you can actually FREEZE it!  Hallelujah!!!  So here is what I did, you can just freeze it straight..... I guess but it's much less colorful.

This is only a portion of the 28 lbs.  It was a lot of Asparagus!

Step 1:  Cut the woody ends off of the bottom.  I usually cut about 2" off the end of all my asparagus.  The ends are tough anyway.  You can chop it into smaller pieces if you want but I usually serve it in long spears so I just left everything longer.

 Step 2: Fill a pot of water (I had a big pot) about half way full of water and bring it to a boil.  This step is the blanching step (I didn't  know what blanching was until I started canning when I got married but I had only blanched peaches and things to can).  When the water is boiling you just put in the asparagus, now remember I had a large pot so I put in about 2 bunches at a time.  My stalks are pretty medium to large sized so I blanched my asparagus for 3 minutes each batch. If you have smaller stalks you could do it for 2 min. or larger stalks 4 min.

  

Step 3: Remove the asparagus from the water when the timer beeps (USE A TIMER!)  Unless you are really good at timing things, I am not so I use a timer for everything and I'll have you know it's been YEARS since I've burned anything :)!  I used tongs to get the asparagus out because I just kept reusing the same water.  Put it right into a dish ( I used a cake pan 9x13) of ice cold water.  The asparagus will still be cooking unless you cool it immediately!  So the ice bath is necessary.  I don't have a picture of this step.  I had the kitchen set up into little stations.  Hank (yep I recruited the MAN!) was cutting the ends off, and I was timing the asparagus and transferring it from hot to cold to towels.  

Step 4: In between batches, take the cooled asparagus and place it on a few kitchen towels.  I just let it drip dry for a couple minutes then placed it in gallon sized freezer bags (Jo helped me label the bags and get it in the bags).

I put quite a bit in each bag.  Like I said we LOVE this stuff!  So feel free to portion your bags to fit your needs.  I even thought doing some quart sized bags would've been great for lunches or a stir fry.  But I only had gallon sized bags and I'm up for leftover asparagus any day.  When it was all said and done it took less than 45 minutes and all my asparagus was ready for the freezer!  I ended up with 11 gallon sized bags ~ holy asparagus!!!!  Wallah!  Fresh asparagus on hand at less than a dollar a pound, you can't beat that!   

And there you have it!  Make it Monday: 28 Pounds of Asparagus!  So now you know what to do when you find a steal on asparagus.  Now to dry my 21lbs of pineapple :)