Unless I’m in The Yelton Manor B&B garden munching a cherry tomato off the vine, my food needs to be “processed”.  Prepared, that is.

“Don’t eat processed food”, they warn.  And they are SO right, boxed or canned grocery products loaded with salt, stripped of vitamins, flavored and preserved with chemicals, handled by dirty hands, transported, and who knows what else has putrefied your edibles all along the way. UGH!

Restaurant food is also processed.  Most restaurant food is factory processed, eateries are just adding more fat and salt and turning it onto plates. It’s assembled with sketchy cleanliness at origin and in the kitchen, that’s my warning based on 45 years of experience with restaurant business.  Cook and eat at home!

You can create an easy system for processing your OWN food.  Here’s how to make it easy, beautiful, healthy and delicious! Always keeping your hands, counters, sinks, cutting boards and utensils impeccably clean, of course!

Purchase organic food, free of poisons in and on them.  If you are purchasing root vegetables, they must ALWAYS be organic.  You’ll pay a snidge more but it’s cheaper than health care, uh huh. Anyway, you will eat better and waste less after I show you how to “process your veggies”, making it a net gain to the max.

Make a week’s plan. If you make 4 weekly plans (soup week 1, pasta week 2, pizza week 3, leftovers and panini’s week 4, for example) you can simply rotate your plan monthly. One day/evening a week you go to the grocery store, purchase most of the food you and your family will eat in the next 5-7 days.  The melons, kiwi, bananas, apples and whatever green (spinach, kale, chard, parsley, cucumber, etc) that will grace your smoothies (one batch=5 drinks). The vegetables that will be soup, pizza, pasta and sandwiches: carrots, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, squash, etc.

By chopping and shaving different ways, you make veggies instantly ready for different recipes/cooking techniques, satisfying and beautiful, never boring. Here I have bagged up the florets of a head of broccoli for steaming, roasting or soup. With a wide, sharp vegetable peeler, I shave the gnarley stalks into wide green noodles, for salads, soups, pizzas, sandwiches. Ziplock bag and into the fridge.

Cauliflower, lovely heads for a crudite plate, soup, roasting or steaming, also shaved for eating raw in salad. Ziplocks, into the fridge! Brussel sprouts?  Yup.  Carrots chopped, shaved and sticks, for soup, salad and snacks! Celery too, clean the gnarly stalks for soup and smoothies, save tender insides and greens for salads and Bloody Marys.

Wash and pat dry your soup/smoothie greens so you can reach for them *ready to roll* for a recipe. Into the fridge. Dice your melons and freeze, ready for smoothies.  Did you buy a legume? Soak it and get it ready for a soup, a stew, burritos, whatever. Into the fridge with it. Did you get citrus? Squeeze limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruit and clementines for cocktails and salad dressings! Into containers and into the door of the fridge for grabbing.

Now, as you are doing this, all the scraps of celery and carrot go into awesome veggie soup stock! No waste!

Get the idea? Put some music on too!

At the same time you are chopping, bagging AND making soup stock, you might also be roasting squash, sweet potatoes, onions, tomato, etc for adding into a breakfast omelette? Perhaps your bread machine is also making a fabulous 12 grain bread for the week’s meals?

Now, thanks to an hour or two of “multi-tasking”, you are ready to eat well at every meal, the fruits and vegetables are ready to go, right at your fingertips.

Process!!!!!!  With simple organization you can be sure you are eating right and also make it easy and quick to make dinner at home, every single day.