I decided it would be good for me to track down all the things I eat in a day to make sure that I get enough nutrients, protein, calcium, etc…
After just one day of doing so, I was surprised and chocked to see that my raw vegetable and fruit consumption was very low. I mean, we do it a lot of vegetables in the form of soups and stir fry, but raw, not so much. Clearly, this had to be changed!
By thinking about it a few minutes, we realized that this was mainly laziness: we did not like to spend extra minutes on peeling, cutting, packing raw vegetables for our lunches. This usually meant that we also wasted a lot of the food we bought because it just got pushed to the back of the fridge (yup, we got a couple of walking eggplants and lettuce heads in the past…) Now that the problem was identified, it was easy to resolve!
So here is a quick tip to make sure you grab at least a handful of raw vegetables every day!
Instead of cutting your vegetables everyday, multiple times a day, it is possible to cut your vegetables up to five days in advance and still preserve their nutritional value.
Of course, the cutting will lead to some loss, about 10-25% of the vitamin C will be gone after 5 days.However, it is also after this amount of time that the vegetables will look bad, and you should throw them out. Another thing to consider is that you limit the loss of nutrients by cutting the vegetables in large pieces.
Avoid shredding, and you will maximize the amount of nutrients that stay in your veggies!
Finally, you want to make sure you keep your vegetable in air-tight containers to help keep them fresh.
So, we had a blast of a vegetable cutting party where bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, zucchini, and celery got cut into little pieces! Stored them into mason jars, and they are ready to go! We cut enough for 3 days, just to make sure that the veggies stayed fresh and good.
This makes it a lot easier to grad vegetables, which is great! We have been doing this for a few months now, and it really helps eating more fresh vegetables. Our wallet is also very happy because everything that is in the fridge gets eaten. Hooray!
My Lighthearted Kitchen 