Fresh food is great. When you think living healthy you think fresh fruit and vegetables, it just sounds good for you. Life can be hectic though and often when food is something we think about just when we start to get hungry, fresh can often go out the window, we don’t always have time to go shopping to get fresh ingredients to cook with every time. Fridges help keep our food fresher for a bit longer and allow us to do a weekly or even fortnightly shop to keep us going. Still though, nothing lives forever and we quite often pull out some dreary looking vegetables just when we need some, which don’t look healthy let alone appetising.
Supermarkets have now started to remove the best before dates from their fresh produce too, in the push to help address the catastrophic amount of food waste we produce, something which is a might boggling thing when there are people struggling to feed themselves. So what can you do to help with food waste and also not be faced with limp vegetables loitering in your fridge?
So how do you get more stamina from your vegetables? simple, the answer is WATER.
We’ve all heard that the human body is mostly water, about 60%, the same goes for the food we eat. The food we consume is mostly made up of water and ranges from about 60% up to 99% water. Just like a human, cut off that water supply and we start to shrivel, give us a drink and we perk up again. In a lot of cases with our vegetables it can be that simple that we give it a drink.
Before using a vegetable, soaking it in cold water can instantly perk it up as it will rehydrate, even just cooking it in water will hydrate it back a certain amount. However if you’re looking at your recently purchased veg and thinking its shelf live is dwindling after a day of buying it, you can take it out of the fridge and stick it in some water to bring it back to 100%. Simply part fill a container of water big enough to house most of the vegetable then put it in.
Root vegetables like carrots will absorb the water all over its body and rehydrate. Stem vegetables like broccoli or asparagus you can sit the stem in for it to drink up. You can trim off the end of the dried base to help with absorption. Then once the veg is hydrated again, you can return to storage.
I often buy a Savoy cabbage, its large green leaves are great. They have lots of flavour and are packed full of goodness. However, I don’t always use a whole one and a few layers down, you’re left with the anaemic looking pale green leaves. But trim off the base a little and then stick it in a bowl of water on your window sill and watch it start to plump up into that perky green cabbage you picked out at the shop. The new leaves will have absorbed the water and the light to push more nutrients back into those outer leaves and greened up. You can usually do this a couple of times to make the most of your cabbage.
Now keeping hydrated definitely helps keep things looking and feeling fresher, but everything starts to lose the good stuff eventually and those minerals and nutrients that make veg so great will start to diminish. You can start to see this when things start to lose their colour. Green vegetables are more susceptible to this and you will notice a broccoli for example, start to turn from the lush dark green to the faded browny green as it gets older. You will also notice when cooking greener vegetables, that they can lose their colour and nutrients more easily to the water, so cooking them gently matters. Where as carrots are much denser, having a higher solute concentration, meaning they don’t impart quite as much and will last a lot longer.
But what if I want to cheat the death of my fresh vegetables!??
Frozen veg is a way to preserve your veg for longer and can keep good for up to a year. If you know your not going to eat it and want to preserve it, freezing it is a great way to keep it. You can blanch the veg first then freeze it ready for use so it just needs to be heated through. If you have a freezer.
But what if I want more!??
Well there is a way!
Dehydration
If instead of topping up the water content of our vegetables we completely remove it, we are left with a fairly well preserved vegetable, which depending on how they are stored can last up to 10 years! However this is if it is vacuum sealed and not opened until use. Impressive though. Dehydration has been around for centuries and is a great way to use up fruit or veg that might otherwise go to waste. Some things, especially fruits, you cannot save with a sip of h2O, but drying them not only preserves all their flavour and sweetness, it intensifies it. Things like apples are great for this and they’re not only good to eat, they’re amazing to cook with. Dehydrated ingredients give a real punch to flavour as they rehydrate with the food flavours you’re cooking with.
To dehydrate food, you simply put it somewhere the temperature is between 40-70 degrees, using your oven is good, after you have cooked in it, let it cool for while then shut it up with the things inside. Or you can leave in the sun with a glass bowl on top to trap some heat, though you’ll want a gap for the air to flow and release the moisture. You can buy a dehydrator which is easy to use too. Remember to cut up your ingredients thin enough so they can dry quickly.
Mushrooms are often an annoying ingredient to buy and use before they go soft, even in the store there are shelves of them already starting to go past their best. However if you slice and dry them, you’re left with great mushroom flavour kicks to your food.
Grind those dried fruit or veg down and you have an instant powder to add to all sorts of foods for extra flavour. If you follow a vegetarian diet, these powders are amazing flavour boosts to all sorts of foods.
But I want my food to last forever!!
Ha you’re crazy! yet there is a way… Through propagation. This is similar to humans living forever, through their children, we take a part of our produce and grow more from it to create new produce. This isn’t very productive with vegetables we buy from the shop unfortunately but we can help some things last forever.
The easiest are herbs, not all, but shrubby herbs you can take cuttings from and make new plants. It’s fairly easy to buy a Rosemary, Sage or Thyme plant, put it in a pot and keep it going for a long time to use as you wish. They’re great in your garden and are really hardy through the winter. However Basil is a little more delicate, especially if it’s a small plant like you buy in a shop. Fresh Basil is great for making pesto or putting in salads or pasta dishes, however one plant is only just enough to make one dish and even if you do have some left over it doesn’t always last too long.
Solution is to snip a few stalks off with leaves and plant them in a glass of water. Easy. The same goes for your Thyme, Sage and Rosemary. This sprig of herb will then soak up the light and the water and start to create new roots to enable it to drink more. Depending on the time of year you’re doing this you’ll want to start these inside on your window sill, but if you have the space you can do this outside in the warmer months, they’ll just want a fairly stable temperature that’s not too cold.
Once they’re shooting out their roots you can transfer them to a pot with some fresh soil, ideally a bit of compost to help feed them, or plant food if you have some, though neither are required. Make a hole stick in the roots first, surround with soil and push down slightly. Keep on top of watering and you’ll have some big healthy new Basil plants with in the next few weeks. You can create a glut of new plants from just one Basil plant on its last legs. It’s fun for you or children to do to and its mostly free.
With fruit, you can also often harvest their seeds to grow new plants. Tomatoes are a fun easy one to try. Taking the seeds, drying them in some paper towel to store until you need them, then planting them in small pots until they turn into plants. Unlike the herbs though, tomatoes will take a lot more effort, making sure to water and feed them and quite often the seeds from your store bought tomato aren’t quite as good as what you might buy specifically for planting, so you’re better of doing that, however it is doable.
It is possible to take a potato and grow new plants from it. Just like a specific seed potato, your potato should start to sprout and make shoots. These can be chopped off and your potato is still good to cook and eat, or you can keep these shoots on and plant your potato for it to produce more potatoes! Potatoes are fairly easy to grow, they can be that simple that often if you leave a potato in the ground by accident, you’ll keep getting potato plants and new potatoes, with that in mind it’s a lot easier to grown them in a large pot or a potato bag full of soil/compost, which gives you the ease of growing them anywhere. This way of growing potatoes is great, though again using a specific seed potato is better and just as cheap. The quality of your potatoes will be better and less prone to disease. If you want to know more about growing potatoes or tomatoes or anything mentioned in this post, please just ask.
So we can all think twice about throwing out things from our fridge and buying new, saving money and the planet. Even your peelings from your vegetables can be used for composting if you have space to do it. Even if your food doesn’t look appetising or presentable, there are still lots of ways you can use them in cooking using their flavour without their looks.
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