Preparing lunch or salads for dinner is very difficult if you are a single person or if you are only cooking for two. In fact, when making salads, have you ever noticed that you have leftovers after you’re done cutting? It happens all the time because you don’t want to put so much of a certain type of vegetable in your salad, otherwise it overwhelms the salad, and then you pretty much have a tomato salad or a cucumber salad. Similarly, it’s good to put a few pieces of carrot, but then you’re left with half the carrot, because one is not enough and two is too many.
Also, if you know anything about nutritional health, you probably realize that once you open a fruit or vegetable, it loses much of its antioxidant value very quickly. Therefore, it has less nutritional value the second time the rest is cut. Due to this fact, I have been known to take leftover salad ingredients and; Soup!
I mean, I cut the leftover ingredients into very small cubes and put them in a small pot, throw in some spices, the kind of spices you need in your diet, but probably don’t want in a salad. And then I boil it for a bit with the lid on the pot, let it cool, and put it in the fridge for later. This helps because you now have an extremely good soup base, and all those antioxidants get trapped in the water. Later, you can add anything you want to that soup, so all the cutting you made on your salad won’t go to waste, nor will any of the other ingredients.
Some people will cut up the ingredients for their salad and then put all the leftover ingredients in little Ziploc bags. But that won’t stop all those antioxidants from escaping, or prevent leftover veggies from losing their nutritional value. Yes, it will prevent some of that nutritional value from being lost, but most of it will be gone. That’s why it makes sense to put it in a soup.
If you had any leftovers, like tomatoes, onions, and other items that would make a good chunky sauce, then you could save some money and buy the least expensive, least chunky sauce at the grocery store, and add those ingredients, thus, It has the homemade ingredients of a more expensive sauce with many more ingredients. Well, I hope you enjoyed my home chef tip of the day. Please consider all this and think about it.
