I love going to the farmers market and seeing all the fruits and vegetables on display with colors so vibrant and flesh so firm and fresh. I often end up buying more than I need, arriving home with bags straining under all that weight, and my heart filled with anticipation for all the lovely healthy dishes about to emerge from my kitchen the next few days.

Then, as it always happens, life gets busy and before I know it, four days have passed and now some of the vegetables are looking rubbery, the herbs have grown limp, and the once-crisp fruit is now a bit sandy and mushy.

Rubbery vegetables and limp herbs in my crisper make me sad. So much hope, so much potential, and now … pffft.

I’d love to be able to avoid wasting good vegetables, fruit, and herbs, and I know many who feel the same way. So today, let’s talk about that.

Do you have any tips for keeping produce fresh?

As previously confessed, I have no great tips. Nada. Well, maybe a couple. Someone once told me never to store my onions and potatoes together. Supposedly, storing them together makes the potatoes grow sprouts and the onions soften faster. So I keep the two far away from each other. For herbs, when mine are close to retirement, I whip up a quick chimichurri with the herbs, garlic, lime or lemon juice, and olive oil. I store that in the fridge and use it to season meat or add it to stir-fries. But that really isn’t keeping it fresh—more like salvaging what’s left of a once-proud bunch of greens.

Betsy says her tip probably doesn’t extend the life of the produce so much as it makes her more likely to use them while they’re still fresh. She washes and cuts the vegetables (cauliflower, carrots, and the like) then stores them to snack on raw or to throw in dishes as she cooks. As for herbs, she’s heard of freezing the herbs with butter or oil in ice cube trays for use later.

Nanci is a big Costco shopper, so she buys lots of fresh fruits and vegetables in bulk. Her favorite is their giant packages of romaine lettuce hearts and blueberries. She likes to clean fruits and veggies on Sunday so that weekday meals are quick and easy. For the romaine, she separates the outer leaves and puts them into her salad spinner and washes them, then lets them sit in the strainer for a while to drain well. Then she wraps the dried leaves in paper towels and puts them into a zip top bag in the refrigerator vegetable bin. She says she finds that the lettuce lasts quite a while this way. She does the same with blueberries, cleaning them in her salad spinner then putting them onto a sheet tray lined with paper towels to dry. Then into the refrigerator they go, stored in a plastic container with a paper towel on the bottom.

Now let’s hear from you! Do you have any advice for keeping produce fresh longer? Help us out and share your tips!

 
Ah, bacon. What is it about bacon that makes hearts go aflutter? Even just the aroma of bacon cooking is sometimes enough to stop people in their tracks to follow the scent trail to its source. People have added bacon to just about everything you can think of, including ice cream and chocolate martinis (served in glasses rimmed with maple syrup and bacon bits, no less). Grocery shelves house bottles of bacon salt and bacon spray. Cooks stash precious jars of bacon grease in the refrigerator, and I promise you using a dollop of that instead of oil will kick up your favorite fried rice recipe a few notches.

Bacon pretty much makes almost everything better—and special. Toss it with some tomatoes and pasta and you have a super simple yet incredibly tasty Bacon Tomato Capellini, which is where the photo above comes from. (If you love bacon and pasta, you’ll definitely want to check that out.)

Since we’ve established there are endless ways to use bacon, let’s talk about cooking bacon.

What’s your favorite method or technique for cooking bacon?

For Betsy, lately it’s been on a foil-lined baking sheet (with sides, of course) in the oven. She loves not having to babysit it on the stove, and the less is mess. She says her mom microwaves it but she thinks doing it that way makes the bacon shrivel and it doesn’t get as crispy. She tried using a wire rack once but her bacon just stuck to the rack, so she likes the foil.

I do pretty much the same thing, but for a different reason. See, my husband doesn’t like the smell of bacon in the house. (Shocker, I know.) So I cook it in the oven on a foil-lined baking sheet, like Betsy. (I skip the wire rack not because my bacon sticks to it but because I don’t enjoy cleaning it.) As soon as the bacon starts to sizzle and the edges look slightly crisp, I shut the oven off and let the bacon finish cooking in the residual heat. That way, when I open the oven door to retrieve the now-crisp bacon, much of the bacon smell will have dissipated inside the oven.

Nanci, on the other hand, is a stovetop kind of girl. She swears by her favorite 12-inch Griswold cast iron skillet and fries several batches of thick cut pepper bacon in one morning. Then she drains the bacon on paper towels, lets it cool, the wraps it up in clean paper towels. All that bacon goes into a bag to store in the freezer for quick microwave heating on weekday mornings. Smart!

How about you? Do you have a favorite method for cooking bacon? Or maybe a favorite bacon trick? It’s your turn to share and we’d love to hear your tips! (Or maybe you just want to profess your undying love for this marvelous piece of porky goodness. That’s okay too. We understand.)

  All of us have treasured bits of culinary wisdom that we learned as children, often simply by watching the cooks in our family move around the kitchen. To this day, I still peel hard-cooked eggs with a spoon the way I’ve watched my mom do it, I always add a pinch of sugar to […]