Prep School

Spring Cleaning.  For me it's not just about your home, it's about your life as well.  And a huge part of that I touched on yesterday when it comes to providing nutrients for your body through salads.  But as simple as salads can be they can take time to prep if you don't want to shell out for the pre-cut veggies.  Now normally we buy leaf lettuce, maybe some spinach and arugula and I chop and mix them.  But for ease, we've been buying the big containers of spring mix salad. 

Still, we like a lot of vegetables in our salad.  So, in order to kind of demonstrate the easiness of it, I timed myself last night while chopping and slicing up veggies.  In an hour I had this:

That is 4 large bunches of carrots (with the greens on top so you know they're fresh), a bunch of radishes, half an English cucumber, half a large red onion, 2 red bell peppers, and a tomato.  It just took me an hour to wash and prepare all of that, and some of it (like the onions, radishes and cucumbers) I was slicing paper thin!

After that I took the time to finish tearing up the chicken we roasted (putting the bones and the gelatinous stuff in the freezer to make stock later), and also cut up 2 pineapples and 3 bananas (mixing some of the pineapple with the bananas to make a simple fruit salad for a couple days).  That bit took me less than half an hour. 

So in an hour and a half I had fresh vegetables and fruit ready, along with some protein.  Simple, no?  And we have veggies for almost the rest of the week (I'll have to slice up more onion and cucumber).  I encourage you to take an hour or 2 on a night where you have some time and just prep produce for the week.  Makes it so much simpler for the day to day!