Prepping and portioning

So! After JG and I have planned out our meals for the week with the help of our recipe binder, we execute The Plan with a few tricks and strategies that I’ll share today, in our third and last installment of “In the Kitchen with RA,” or whatever catchy title someone else can imagine.

I am a huge proponent of pre-portioning, and it works for us for several reasons:

• Have I mentioned that I love to eat leftovers?
• Neither JG or I minds eating the same basic lunch at work each day.
• By putting in the extra time in advance, we save time when we have less of it.

In the past, when we had a large dish for dinner with leftovers for lunches we used to just slap foil onto the casserole dish and slide it into the fridge. However, even the short process of digging out a container, dishing out a helping, and putting the casserole back in the fridge seemed like a struggle in the morning, so now we pack up serving-sized portions right after dinner. The serving dish gets washed that night (or maybe the morning after, ahem), and we have a stack of lunch portions that are all ready to grab when we need them.

JG and I are committed to packing lunches to work because the cost of buying food at work is too much for either of us to swallow. Plus, we know what we’re eating, instead of relying on the nutritional gods of institutional food preparation for any kind of dietary balance. For our lunches, we always have the following items on hand:

• Apples and oranges
• Goldfish
• Cheese cracker packets, the sandwich-y kind
• Strawberry applesauce
• Yogurt
• Granola bars
• String cheese

Between this list of staples and the pre-packed leftovers, we can pack our lunches really quickly. We can just go down the line and take a cup of yogurt from the fridge, an apple from the crisper, or an orange from the fruit bowl. There’s no thinking involved, which is great in the morning.

“But what about the Goldfish?” you ask. Ah, yes. That’s where the true commitment to pre-portioning comes to light. See, I make my own 100-calorie packs. I take a box of Goldfish (a size down from the giant cartons), measure out half-cup portions of crackers, and seal them up in snack bags. I usually get about a dozen servings that are significantly smaller than what I would take if I were left to my own devices, and I keep them in a basket next to the fruit bowl. A little excessive though it may seem, I’m willing to spend my time with a box of Goldfish and a measuring cup for the small reward of saving myself the trouble when I am groggy from staying up late to attempt just one more crossword puzzle.

When it comes to making dinner, our most helpful strategy is prepping lettuce for salad ahead of time. On most nights, our vegetable side dish is a salad. Tomorrow, we’re having steamed broccoli, but most of the time, it’s the same old salad of romaine lettuce, baby carrots, and cherry tomatoes, and maybe cucumbers, if we’re feeling wild. It’s not terribly exciting, but it helps take the guesswork out of that part of the meal, and that’s fine with me. Plus, JG is not big on cooked vegetables, so it satisfies everyone.

Maybe it was just me, but when I ate salad out of a bag regularly, I dreaded reaching into the bag only to emerge with a handful of soggy grossness. Though not as repulsing, but equally annoying, was having a salad full of unappetizing stalk, thanks to an undiscerning packing plant. Instead of succumbing to the overpriced convenience of bags of salad, we learned to prepare our own, thanks to the wisdom of Alton Brown and our trusty salad spinner. I urge every engaged friend to add a salad spinner to their registries for this express purpose, and I’ve compiled a quick tutorial for any salad aficionados out there.

In the Good Eats episode about greens, Alton Brown explains that when manufacturers produce bagged salad, they use cutting machines, which makes sense. Unfortunately, by using a blade, too many of the cell walls are damaged, and that leads to speedier spoilage that is only exacerbated by the plastic bag, which traps moisture. The following method, recommended in that episode, helps to combat both of those issues.

You will need a good-sized salad spinner, and Alton recommends the OXO model due to its user-friendliness and lack of rocking motion. Get yourself a nice head of lettuce (we like romaine), and turn on the faucet to fill your sink (or any large receptacle, like the bowl of your salad spinner) with cold water.

1. Tear, don’t cut, the lettuce leaves into pieces and toss into the water. I like to tear the leaves away from the stalk, so we have no thick stalk-y pieces in the salad, but that’s just me.
2. Swish the lettuce around to loosen any sediment, which should fall to the bottom.
3. Transfer the lettuce to your salad spinner, give it a decent spin, and dump out any water that accumulates in the bowl as you marvel at the wonder that is centrifugal force.
4. Spin the lettuce again, if you like. You want the lettuce to be fairly dry, but there’s no need to go crazy.
5. Place paper towels between the basket and the bowl, and toss one in the basket, while you’re at it. The paper towels help wick moisture so that the lettuce doesn’t dry out or spoil from too much water.
6. Store the lettuce in the fridge and never look back at the bagged stuff again.

Every head of lettuce we buy gets prepped this way. If you come to our house and have salad, it will have gone through this process. Our salad spinner is a permanent fixture in our fridge. See?

Since we eat salad almost every day, going through these steps really makes a difference when it comes to meal preparation, and I’m convinced that what we have is cheaper and of better quality than anything we could get pre-packaged. Plus, I never run the risk of a handful of slimy lettuce, so everybody wins.

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I hope that these last few days of organizational posts have been at least entertaining, if not a little bit helpful, too. For what it’s worth, please don’t think that we have this level of machine-like efficiency throughout our entire home; I just choose not to take pictures of my crowded dresser or the office that’s piled with paper. When it comes to making a shopping list , organizing recipes, and packing up crackers, though, I feel pretty confident. You have to start somewhere, right?

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