Fresh vegetables everywhere – I love the way that sounds, all I hear is body, mind, soul care.
I’m so excited to have a very special guest post for you today. Darcy Geho from Perserving My Sanity where she focuses on natural living, healthy cooking, and food preservation.
I don’t know about you, but in the summertime when fresh veggies are more widely available in the Midwest than normal, it’s hard for me to not buy everything! We also grow a large garden, so between
what we grow and buy, sometimes the produce in our refrigerator and “what to do with all of it” can get
to be a bit overwhelming.
I do a lot of home canning and today I want to talk about a few other options,
because I know not everyone has the time or desire to dabble in home food preservation. If you DO want to learn more about various types of food preservation, I have a comprehensive post about that here.
Salads
This is kind of a no-brainer I suppose, but big dinner salads filled with a variety of fresh vegetables and your protein of choice are a great way to enjoy those fresh summer flavors. I recently shared my favorite
kale salad, but I also have a BBQ chicken salad that makes a great summer dinner. You can find those recipes here.
Pizza and Pasta
We often like to make a healthy pizza crust version with Greek yogurt, and top it with a variety of vegetable and protein combinations. Check out the recipe and method for how we make the crust, and a list of our favorite topping combinations! I would encourage you to explore your own combinations too – when you are talking about cooking with fresh vegetables, the options are really so endless.
Quick Pickles
If you find yourself with some vegetables that are getting tired in the refrigerator, a great thing you can do is make quick pickles with them. You can of course do this with cucumber and onion to make a quick traditional pickle, but you can also pickle things like radishes, carrots, peppers, and more! A pretty standard brine features your vegetables of choice, equal parts water and vinegar, and equal parts sugar
and salt. You can read more about how I do this here. My favorite combination is radishes and sweet
peppers with the brine mentioned above, plus cumin. It’s amazing on tacos!
Cooking
If you find yourself with vegetables you “had to have” a few days ago at the market but haven’t yet eaten, a great way to lengthen their shelf life is to cook them. We often do this with kale in our house.
We like to cook large batches of it to have on hand in the fridge to either eat as a quick dinner side or mix into your main course. Broccoli, cabbage, asparagus, brussels sprouts are a few additional ideas of what you can cook now to eat over the next few days. Another regular staple found in our refrigerator is
a bowl of caramelized onions. They can be used for so many things and are great to have on hand.
Dehydrating
Now, I know what you are thinking … and yes this does venture a bit over into “food preservation” territory. But, dehydrating is really easy, I promise! It’s a great way to preserve nutrients of the food and it saves so much space compared to freezing or canning. In the past year, I’ve dehydrated lemon and orange slices, arugula, kale, spinach, herbs, shredded zucchini, and more. If you’d like to learn more about this process, you can check out this post.
Wow, so many great ideas and tips. Our summer will taste amazing! Thanks again to Darcy for sharing her love and passion with us – nutrition is body, mind, soul♥
Darcy Geho is the owner of PreservingMySanity.com, a lifestyle blog focused on natural living, healthy cooking, and food preservation. A recurring message throughout her blog is that cooking at home and preserving foods doesn’t have to be hard, and anyone can do it as long as they are willing to try. Darcy and her husband live in Minnesota with their dogs and cat where they enjoy outdoor adventures throughout (most of) the year.
