Category: Kitchen Musings

We all buy/harvest veggies with best intentions of eating them up before they turn. And then life happens.

Good news! You can revive your veggies with this very cheap and easy trick. As long as your veggies aren’t too soft and haven’t grown mold, you can revive them with a cold bath! This makes sense, right, because vegetables go limp because of dehydration, so soaking them in water allows them to suck up water and regain their crisp, happy vibrancy. (Hint: this is a good reason to keep veggies in the crisper drawer – it’s more humid than the rest of the fridge.)

So… gather up your wilting produce and submerge them in a bowl (or multiple bowls) of cold water. Sometimes, when we bring in root vegetables from the garden, we wash them and store them in a bowl of cold water in the fridge until we use them. So water can be used to store or revive veggies – use your best judgement for your circumstance.

• celery – cut off the ends and stick them in a bowl of water for about 30 minutes
• carrots – cut off the ends of whole carrots or cut carrots into matchsticks, put in bowl until crisp
• beets – put whole beets into a bowl of water (don’t cut or peel them or they will bleed into water)
• lettuce – place roots or cut ends into a bowl of water
• potatoes – peel and submerge in a bowl of water
• broccoli – trim the bottom and place in water or put florets into bowl of water
• asparagus – trim ends and stand upright in a bowl of water until crisp
• herbs – trim ends and put in a vase (looks great on your dining room table!)

Some vegetables like winter and summer squash will not recover with this trick.

Do some experiments if you’re considering tossing a wilting veggie. It’s worth a shot!

Should I chop, dice or mince? What does that even mean?! How am I supposed to know how big or small to cut my veggies?!

Chop: a pretty large, chunky piece of vegetable (right)
Dice: medium sized veggie (middle)
Mince: smallest cut (left)

Why do we need to understand the difference? Well, the author of the recipe selected a certain size based on how long it would take the veggies to cook and the resulting texture or “mouth feel” of the final dish.

Now that you know why there are different sizes of cuts you can cut up veggies to suit your preference. Be aware the cook time and mouth feel will change with your choices, but you don’t have to follow the recipe exactly. Maybe you are making a cucumber salad and the recipe calls for the cukes to be “thinly sliced” but you prefer to have big chunks of cukes on your fork so you choose to cut thick slices and then cut those in half. Bravo! Make the recipe your own.