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Hey everybody, it's Jennifer and Matt. We're back here in the Discovery kitchen, and we
talked before about reading food label which had to do with processed foods. But today
we're going to talk a little bit more about whole foods and how to make whole foods cooking
easy. What do you think?
Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean it's very important to make healthy foods convenient. So what
did you bring me from the store?
I brought you vegetables. Awesome. Because vegetable tend to be, I think, when people
are trying to prepare a meal where they can really run into a time crunch. So I thought
we'd talk a little about vegetable prep and what you can do when you get home from the
grocery store to really make your life easy, and make healthy eating convenient.
And that's the trick right there. What you want to do is to go to the store once or twice
a week and get your fresh produce, but just don't come home and put it in the refrigerator
because then,every day of the meal, every day of the week, you have to come home and
you have to cut it up, and you have to get the cutting board and get out the salad spinner
or whatever. But if you take care of this as soon as you get home, you can process it
easily, package it, put it in the refrigerator, and it's grab and go, every day of the week.
So...
Exactly. So, I think one thing that we're going to talk about is Matt's going to show
you how to prep your vegetables. But the thing to keep in mind is really, thinking ahead
for what you wnat to prepare for the next day. So you're not starting entirely from
scratch every time you step into the kitchen.
Right, so Jennifer came in with a variety of vegetables, it's what we encourage. Get
organic whenever possible, and then you always want to wash your vegetables before you prep
them. So one of my favorite ways to deal with leafy greens, here's a head of lettuce, but
it could be the Mesclun mix, it could be collard greens, kale. Anything you can thing of along
those lines. It's a real simple method, I like using a water bath, and what I do is
I'll just get rid of the core here, real quick, and then you just take the leaves and literally
put them in a nice bath of water. Now you want to use a nice big big, and nice cold
water. You can clean out your sink and use your sink. That works really well. You just
want this to sit in there. Let all the dirt fall off. If you think that you're going to
put your salad or greens in a collander and spray it, and get it off, it's really not
the best way. This is very good, and it's also a really good way to rehydrate your vegetables.
If you get that lettuce that's been sitting in the refrigerator, and it's getting a little
limp, you put it in some really cold water in a water bath and let it sit for a few minutes.
It crisps back up a little bit.
Oh that's great. Yeah. So what we're going to do is we're going to let this sit in here
a little bit, and you want to dunk it, and just kind of lift it, and let the dirt fall
off. Eventually what you want to do, is you want to get it dry. The best way to get it
dry is the salad spinner. The salad spinner will not only remove the water, but this is
a great way to store your vegetables in the refrigerator, because it keeps them from laying
down in the bottom of the container, let's air circulate all the way around, so.
Also great to know for vegetable storage, if you don't have a salad spinner or if you
don't want to keep your salad spinner in the fridge, if you just take a large baggie and
put a paper towel in, the paper towel will actually absorb the extra moisture form the
vegetable which tends to be why vegetables go bad. So if you have the paper towel in,
generally, what do you think? Pre-cut vegetables - about 5 to 7 days, right?
Easily, definitely. Especially if you're buying local organic, you're going to get maximum
freshness out of that, and it'll last very long.
Yup. So wash them, chop them, plastic bag with a paper towel and you're good for about
a week.
Right, so we're going to let this sit in there before we put it in the spinner.
Now what we have here, is we've got some nice brocolli, some celery, some red peppers, some
carrots. Now what I'd like to think about this and what I do in my home is, I come home
from the groucery store, and I'll prep all this stuff and get it ready to go into a container,
much like this. Simply from the standpoint that when you're coming home from those busy
days with the kids and they're hungry, all you have to do is take out the container and
it's ready to go. What works in my house always is that if you've got a busy lifestyle, and
the kids are really hungry and they're doing this, and they're doing a really good job
at eating these vegetables, you don't really have to worry about feeding them more vegetables
at dinner time.
Exactly. So it takes the pressure off for dinner. You just focus on the protein and
the carbohydrate at dinner. You've already got the vegetables down since they ate them
for snack, and you're good. Life is easy.
Right, absolutely. So you know, I get the red peppers prepped. I just cut that, get
the top off, remove the seeds, and what I can do is just start cutting these into strips,
like so.
Great, and kids love red pepper. A lot of the time, kids hear the word "pepper" and
they think spicy. So, it's really important when you're serving red pepper to let the
kids know that it's nice and sweet.
And carrots, if you want to peel them, go right ahead. Then, the best thing to do there,
and these all keep really, really well believe it or not in the refrigerator. So, get it
cut like this, and then you can cut it to different sized sticks as you wish. Again,
you can just put it into a container, right into the refrigerator. If you just take 15
or 20 minutes every time you come home from the store, you do this once, and you don't
have to do this again tomorrow or the next day. It saves a lot of time and makes it convenient.
You can even pre-cook some of these things. So I mentioned collard greens. So, say you
came home and you prepped your collard greens, you chopped it up. You can saute them, get
it all cooked and get it in to the refrigerator, and then you have a nice pile of ready to
go greens. Makes it very convenient and very healthy.
Great tip. So just remember that whole foods cooking and whole foods preparation for food
doesn't have to be time consuming every single day. With just a few quick steps when you
get home, you'll be good to go for the week.
Thank you. We'll see you again soon. 'Bye!