Penelope and I went blueberry picking last weekend and came home with 5 pounds of blueberries. We used 2 pints for a blueberry pie (recipe and tutorial to coming soon!) and froze the rest.
First I picked off all the stems and picked out any red and not fully ripe berries. I also looked for berries that had been crushed or cracked. Then I spread them out on to cookie sheets and put them in the freezer. DO NOT wash them before you lay them on the cookie sheets.
I put some in the deep freezer and some in our side door freezer connected to our fridge. I let them freeze for about two days and then I took them out and put them in gallon freezer bags and laid them flat, like bricks. By freezing them on the cookie sheets first, the berries do not stick together in the bag and you can scoop out a cup at time as needed. The owner of the blueberry farm that we visited said that she keeps them in her deep freezer for up to a year, in a side door freezer they would last six months.
We found the organic blueberry u-pick farm by searching LocalHarvest.org. Its a great site to help you find organic, local and farm fresh foods. You can find other resources for produce here.
This is a blog post I found with a yummy blueberry recipe and she also had some Aruvedic information about blueberries.
Growing up we had lots of wild blueberries around our house. My Dad loved blueberry pie, so he would dutifully pick them so my Mother would bake pie. We had so many blueberries, that one of the things my mom would do is freeze the blueberries as pies minus the crust. She would make the filling, line the pie plate with foil, fill, and once frozen, wrap the filling and take it out of the pie plate. We would have a stack of blueberry pie fillings in the freezer to last us awhile. When my Dad wanted pie she would put the frozen filling in a pie crust and bake. They always came out perfect but I don’t know how she baked the frozen filling without burning the crust. I know this has nothing really to do with your post …just the freezing and blueberry part reminded me of it
I only have a small side-by-side freezer…so I can’t stock up too much unfortunately….but enjoyed this and reading some on the crockpot recipes.
What a great story, thanks for sharing! And what a genius idea of your mom!