How to Freeze Cilantro

 

To blanch fresh cilantro/coriander, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Have a big bowl of ice water ready.

Once the water is boiling, dip your bunch of cilantro into it just until it wilts. This shouldn't take more than a few seconds. You don't want to cook out the flavor of the herb, just kill off those decomposing enzymes.

As soon as the cilantro has wilted, immediately transfer it to the ice water. This eliminates the residual heat that would otherwise continue to cook it.

Pat the blanched cilantro dry.

Strip the leaves off the stems and transfer to freezer bags and freeze. 

Tip: spread the leaves thinly in the bags and store flat. This will enable you to break off just what you need when you want to use some - but not all - of a bag of frozen herbs.

Freezing Celery and Scallions

 

Frozen Celery

A while back I tried a Pinterest experiment of freezing chopped green onions.  I am so sold on this idea and totally love it!  So I wanted to try it out with another ingredient that I like to have, and is a key ingredient to some recipes, but we don't use it often enough to justify having it in the fridge all the time..... Celery.

Using the same idea, I cut up a large bunch of celery and placed it into a Tupperware round 3 container (or a spaghetti dispenser would work).  For my green onions I had a shaker top, but the celery I just used the regular seal.

This is just as great as the onions!
I never have to worry about having celery in the fridge anymore!  I'm loving this!