Sunday, July 31, 2011

Spent the morning prepping veggies

I picked up another big shipment of vegetables from the CSA farm yesterday. More chard, beets (and their tops), summer squash, tomatoes, oak leaf lettuces (two big heads!), jalapenos, corn, onions, basil...OMG! There's even more stuff! I've worked all morning to get it all washed and put away.

We've been eating really well at our house since I joined the CSA. Plenty of veggies, but they were starting to come in a little faster than my boys and I were able to eat. So last week I started blanching and freezing the vegetables that can survive those conditions. Namely the greens and the corn. It's simple to do, and the instructions for it can be found on the Pick-Your-Own website. (Pick-Your-Own vegetables...not your nose.)

(Sorry, I've been hanging out with my 13-year-old.)

So now I have close to a dozen bags of greens (collards and radish from last week, chard and beet from this week), and four family servings of corn on the cob set aside for the winter. How cool is that! In the fridge, there's three big bags of washed lettuces, cucumbers and leeks, ready for salads. On the counter I've got tomatoes in various stages of ripening. I'm having a huge craving for a BLT salad at lunch.

I have to say, with all these veggies, my intestines are finally happy. I've been reading up on pre- and pro-biotics, how eating those can be more important than eating a lot of fiber. The pro-biotics are the foods responsible for introducing the right bacteria in the intestines to support healthy digestion, and the pre-biotics are important for feeding that bacteria. Keeping that bacteria healthy and thriving is what helps food to digest and pass through, plus it helps maintain our immune system which prevents us from getting sick or speeds our recovery when we do get sick.

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