Just as you have taken care of your vegetable plants so they will produce lots of good things to eat, you need to take care of your vegetables after you pick them. The goal after the harvest is to retain the freshness and nutrition that your vegetables have until you eat them. Much of your produce will go in your vegetable drawer in the refrigerator, but some vegetables do not go there.
Here are some tips to keep your food tasting good.
- Do not put tomatoes in the refrigerator. It is too cold for them. Place them on a window sill or the counter until you are ready to eat them.
- Wash all your produce before you cook or eat it. For root vegetables, such as potatoes, a produce scrubber is helpful to get all the dirt off without bruising the vegetable.
- Wash greens several times, paying particular attention to where the leaves meet the stem. Put them in a salad spinner and spin them dry. Inspect them to make sure you got all the dirt off. Gritty greens are not fun to eat.
- Get a good vegetable cookbook to give you new ideas to cook your bounty. The one I use is Vegetables Illustrated: An Inspiring Guide with 700+ Kitchen-Tested Recipes by America’s Test Kitchen, but there are many of them out there. Cookbooks can help keep you from growing bored eating the zucchini squash and other prolific producers the same old way.
- If you have children, let them help you prepare the vegetables you have grown for the table. Children are much more likely to eat vegetables they have grown.
- If you are cooking something and the measures are metric, you will need a handy conversion tool. This one comes from CulinarySchools.org. If your child is interested, this website has a collection of over 150 online games to help familiarize children with food, farming, cooking, the culinary arts, the restaurant business, and hospitality-related careers.
Vegetables taste best right out of the garden. Use these tips to keep them tasting good all the way to your table. You don’t want to waste all the effort that went into growing your vegetables by storing and preparing them poorly after the harvest.
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
