It's better to barter

Sorry about my recent absence, but it is August in Iowa so I am up to my elbows in produce. I know, you miss the animal posts, me too, and I will be getting back to the critters soon, but for now harvesting, freezing, canning are my life...and baking..and weeding....and mowing....and...notice that I made no mention of cleaning the house...I digress.

I have 'outed ' myself many times on this blog as a bartering/salvaging/repurposing  fool. I think perhaps this obsession stems from when I was a small child. I remember whenever we stayed at my Grandmother's cottage (back in the olden days) there was no garbage collection so we had to gather up any unwanted items and haul them to the town dump. We are a strange family so this was always kind of an adventure for us. Back then you could drop off your discarded items at the dump and you were allowed to wander about in search of treasure...granted there was not a whole lot of treasure to be found but there was a whole lot of really disgusting stuff, and huge, swirling flocks of seagulls searching through the mountains of debris . But I liked the concept- you drop off junk-you bring home junk, it all made sense to me.....as I am typing this it just occurred to me what an odd practice this was, and how strange it must sound, but if you've been reading my blog for any length of time you have probably grown immune to my oddities, plus it gives you a little insight into my twisted childhood.....once again, I digress.

ANYWAY, I love to trade things, especially at this time of year when there is the mad dash to 'put up' food for the long winter months. So, when my neighbor Don called to tell me that another neighbor had finished picking his field of sweetcorn and gave Don permission to take whatever he needed and bring some to me if I wanted any, well, I just got all tingly! I gladly accepted the offer, and in return, when the corn was delivered, I gave Don some of the Summer Squash that I accidentally grew...and loathe (his family likes it), and a bucket of pears. See how that works? I got rid of squash I didn't want, pears that I didn't have time to get to (I already made 4 cases of Caramel Pear jam and have another pear tree that will be ripe soon) and Don got stuff his family needs-I got some free corn. Now all I have to do is take a basket of cookies, nut rolls and jam to the neighbor who grew the corn....nobody expects anything in return, but that is part of the fun. The corn was delivered on Tuesday, which is a day that I have Farmers' market, so I wasn't going to be able to process it until the next day. That evening, at market, a friend traded me more corn for some baked goods. So, I had a whole lot of corn..almost like chicken math. 

I have always frozen sweetcorn by blanching it before I freeze it, but my market buddy informed me that I don't need to do that, he gave me an old time recipe for freezing corn that sounded too good to be true....maybe it is....he swears by it though. I tried his method, but won't know how it worked out until I actually thaw some and taste it... I probably should thaw some before I freeze another batch so that I don't waste a whole bunch of time, corn and freezer bags if it was a disastrous endeavor. Anyway, I am going to drag you all down with me and give you the recipe so that we can all improperly freeze corn together.
15 cups of corn cut off the cob-raw. I think I used about a bushel of corn to get 15 cups.
5 cups of ice water
1/2 cup of sugar
2 Tablespoons of salt
So basically all you are doing is cutting the corn off the cob, well, after you husk it of course. Dumping 15 cups of it into some sort of large vessel, vat, bowl, pot, cauldron, what-have-you. Add the sugar and salt-throw it in freezer bags-liquid included. I dunno, he says it works.
OK, when I looked at this picture I, like you, thought, "boy, that looks disturbing" but the dark spots are just ice cubes.

Now that you have it all tucked neatly away in freezer bags, all you will have to do is get rid of your big bucket of corn leavings...maybe you could take it to the dump.

I put mine in my compost pile and my roosters promptly took them back out of the compost pile to pick the cobs clean. See? Dump-picking is fun for everyone.