From Plot to Plate: Freezing Yellow Beans

 If you've been anywhere near a British allotment this week, you'll know exactly what's happened. One minute you've got a modest little row of dwarf yellow beans doing their quiet thing, minding their own business, and the next you're wading through them like you've wandered into a jungle that's decided to fight back. I went up on Sunday evening with a small colander, thinking I'd pick "a few for tea Monday." I came back down with two full Small buckets, a bad back, and the distinct feeling that the beans had been laughing at me the whole time.

And as if the yellow beans weren't cheeky enough on their own, the green climbing beans have now decided to join the party too. So we've gone from "ooh, lovely, our first beans of the year" to "please, someone, take these off us" in the space of about a week. That's allotment life for you. Feast or famine, never a happy medium.

The Bean Ambush

Sam turned up Sunday evening straight from work, still in his overalls, and took one look at the table.

"What's happened here then? Bean explosion?"

"Something like that."

He picked one up, inspected it like a jeweller checking a diamond, and said, completely deadpan, "You do know we're not actually running a market stall, don't you, Dad?"

Cheeky beggar. Though he wasn't wrong. Between the yellow dwarf beans and the green climbers, we'd got enough to feed a small village, and Sara's face when she came through from the kitchen said it all — that particular look of a woman who has just realised her evening plans have changed dramatically, and not necessarily for the better.

Iris, ever the optimist, took one look at the pile and said, "Ooh, can we do the blanching thing again? I like the blanching thing." Bless her. Seventeen years old and genuinely excited about a pan of boiling water. That's an allotment kid for you.

Why We Bother With All This Palaver

Now, I know what some of you might be thinking. Why not just eat them fresh and let the rest go? Well, two reasons. First, my dad drummed it into me from a young age that nothing you've grown gets wasted, not so much as a bean pod, and that lesson has stuck with me my whole life. Second, and rather more practically, come January when it's blowing a gale outside and the allotment looks about as inviting as a car park in the rain, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, quite like pulling a bag of your own home-grown beans out of the freezer. It tastes like summer wrapped up and saved for later. Frugal, satisfying, and it makes the whole growing season feel like it's paying you back twice over.

Sara's very much of the same mind. She's the proper engine room of this operation, if I'm honest. I grow it, she and the kids and I pick it, but it's Sara who turns a kitchen table full of beans into something that'll actually feed us in the depths of winter. If you want to see how she does the rest of the preserving magic, her blog Frugal in Lincolnshire is well worth a look. She's forgotten more about make-do-and-mend kitchen sense than I'll ever know.

Blanching for the Freezer

This bit's simple enough that even I can't mess it up, and believe me, that's saying something.

What you need:

• Your beans, topped, tailed, and cut into even pieces (we do ours about an inch and a half long)
• A big pan of boiling water
• A bowl of icy cold water, ice cubes and all
• Freezer bags, labelled (learn from my mistakes — an unlabelled bag of green things from the freezer in November is a genuine mystery)

How we do it:

1. Boil the beans for two to three minutes. No longer — you're not trying to cook them, just stop them in their tracks.
2. Whip them straight out and plunge them into the icy water. This "shocks" them and stops the cooking process, keeping the colour and the crunch.
3. Drain them well and pat them as dry as you reasonably can. Nobody wants a freezer bag full of ice crystals.
4. Bag them up in portions that make sense for your family. We do ours in meal-sized bags because, frankly, nobody wants to be hacking a giant frozen bean brick apart with a rolling pin at half five on a Tuesday.
5. Squeeze the air out, label it, date it, and into the freezer it goes.

Iris has become quite the expert timekeeper on this job, standing over the pan with my phone stopwatch going, absolutely refusing to let anyone's beans go a second over the three minutes. She takes it very seriously indeed. I've never seen a teenager so invested in a kitchen timer.

A Little Something for the Table

Because a post about beans wouldn't be complete without something to actually eat, here's a simple one we've been enjoying this week, straight from plot to plate with minimal fuss.

Simon's Buttery Beans with Garlic and Lemon

Take a good couple of handfuls of your fresh yellow and green beans, topped and tailed. Steam or boil for about four minutes until just tender. Meanwhile, melt a knob of butter in a pan with a crushed garlic clove and let it go gently golden, not brown. Toss the drained beans through the garlic butter, squeeze over a little lemon juice, season, and serve straight away. Takes ten minutes, and it makes plain beans feel like something you'd be served in a restaurant, if that restaurant had a very good allotment out the back.

Beauty Among the Beans

It's not been all beans this week, mind. While we were up there battling the bean jungle, I couldn't help but notice the flower bed's put on a proper show. The dahlias are still going strong, and there's a nasturtium that's decided it owns the entire corner bed now, cheerfully clambering over everything in its path like it's paying rent on the whole plot. There's something rather nice about growing food and flowers side by side — one feeds the body, the other feeds something else entirely.

Right, Your Turn

So that's some our week — beans everywhere, a freezer filling up nicely, jars pinging away on the side, and Sam still not quite forgiving me for the market stall comment. But I'd love to know how you deal with a glut like this. Do you freeze, do you bottle, or have you got a proper family recipe that makes short work of a bean mountain? Tell me in the comments — I'm always after new ideas, and I suspect Sara is too.

Happy growing, everyone. See you on the plot.