Web sites offer ways to preserve those wonderful tastes of summer

By JIM BROOKS

Gardeners all over are watching the skies for rain as we prepare our plots for what we hope will be a wetter and more productive summer.

If you set out early peas, carrots, onions or other cool weather vegetables, then you're probably already enjoying the fruits of your early labor.

Or you may be making treks to your local farmer's market to find the best in fresh locally grown produce. Either way, there's nothing better than that fresh taste of garden-grown vegetables.

My first planting of sugar snap peas is already producing some of those deliciously sweet, plump pods that even my daughter says "taste like candy" fresh off the vine.

Unfortunately, last year we didn't have a freezer to help us preserve some of the bounty our garden provided, but we didn't make that mistake this year. But freezing vegetables properly presents certain challenges and requires techniques that need to be followed for optimum results.

To keep our sugar snaps green and sweet in the freezer we needed to blanche them -- but for how long?

My wife dug out her dog-eared Fanny Farmer cookbook while I fired up my PC and hit my favorite search engines. There's a bushel of sites out there, and here's a few of those I've thought were handiest.

• The National Food Safety Database is a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about preserving and keeping fruits and vegetables.

The site is hosted by the University of Florida, and is funded by the USDA. University professors from all over the U.S contributed the site's content.

The database also covers other good-to-know household information, including cooking safety, how to properly can fruits and vegetables, holiday food safety issues, household pests and how to properly handle wild game as food.

I went straight to the consumer information menu, where I found charts on the proper steps needed to freeze each type of vegetable. In minutes, we had our pot full of water boiling, ready to blanche our sugar snaps in preparation for freezing.

Point your Web browser to www.foodsafety.ufl.edu for more information on keeping those garden-fresh veggies around to enjoy all year.

• For general information on how to properly prepare and freeze your garden vegetables, you can visit the Utah State University extension web site at www.ext.usu.edu/publica/foodpubs.htm.

They have many of their extension publications online to view, some in Adobe Acrobat format that can be neatly printed out at your home PC.

Just like your local extension office, you'll find information on food safety, canning, freezing, kitchen safety and plenty of other good information online at the Web site.

Some of the publications are in Acrobat format, which means you may need to download the free Adobe Acrobat viewer to properly view the documents.

• The Ball Blue Book Guide to Home Canning has a section devoted to freezing as well as drying your home vegetables and fruit. You can find the booklet in many stores that sell canning jars and supplies, or order it at their Web site, www.homecanning.com.

STORM WATCH. The National Weather Service's Louisville office has a collection of radar images of the storms that swept through Leitchfield, Ky., posted on their Web sites in the "Science and Technology" section.

What makes the images so interesting is the commentary posted with each image, and the cross-section radar images of the storm immediately before and after the tornadoes struck Grayson County.

If you're interested in weather, or want to learn more about tornadoes and weather radar imagery, you owe yourself a visit to this site.

Point your browser to www.crh.noaa.gov/lmk/soo/.

BUG ALERT. It seems like a steady flow of copycat computer viruses have been floating around since the "Love Bug" shut down many corporate e-mail systems in the U.S. and around the world a few weeks ago.

The latest e-mailed virus comes as an attachment that's labeled as a resume or "Killer Resume" -- surely a move to drive human resource managers crazy.

If the attachment -- which is a Microsoft Word document named either "Explorer.doc" or "Resume.doc" -- is opened, the virus sends itself via e-mail to the user's e-mail address book. When the user closes the Word document, the virus deletes a number of important files on the user's hard drive.

The virus appeared to be spreading slowly, probably due to awareness most users have about opening unexpected or suspicious file attachments.

At press time, software makers were working to update their files to detect and stop the virus if it is downloaded and launched.

The best move is to avoid attachments that you aren't expecting, and delete suspicious attachments rather than opening them.

For more information on this virus, and learn more about antivirus software to combat similar viruses, visit Network Associates at www.nai.com, or Symantec Corp. at www.symantec.com.

Comments and questions about this column may be sent to jbrooks@myoldkentuckyhome.com, or visit www.myoldkentuckyhome.com on the World Wide Web.

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