One more post about food… 5 ways to make good food easier

I do not have knife skills, or even sharp knives. (I REALLY need to get my knives sharpened, like wow.) So, chopping things is the biggest time suck as far as my cooking goes, and for the longest time it kept me from eating as many fruits and vegetables as I could. Here are five ways to make prepping go faster.

1. Scissors. I use scissors to cut anything they can cut, including green onions, leafy greens, bacon, etc. You can hold the stuff right over the pan and snip away.
2. I have this tiny food processor thing with lots of attachments. I looked all over for one just like it and this is the closest I could find: Hamilton Beach 59765 2 Speed Hand Blender Mine is a bit more understated. It has a handle like a hand blender, and I can attach an immersion blender, two blender heads, or hook it up to a little chopper. The key here is that it is small, so it easy to wash.
3. Buy pre-chopped. It’s more expensive, but if I didn’t buy grated carrots, I might never experience them. I also have little tubes of garlic, ginger, lemongrass, and chili paste that I put in if I only need a little. Way easier than trying to mince the hell out of these items when they are going into something saucy.
4. Right tool for the job. Get one of those heavy in the hand metal citrus squeezers, get the crazy avocado scooper-cutter and the hard-boiled egg slicer and the apple/pear segmenter and the spinning herb mincer thing and a micro-planer. It really does save time and each one of them is a billion times faster than my hand and a dull knife.
5. Leave stuff big and or whole. What are you afraid of? I’m the one eating the vast majority of the food I make, so I am not going to complain that the stew has “too big of pieces” (I have heard that complaint & that person no longer eats ANYthing of mine). How can you taste the goodness of a potato if you’ve minced it into oblivion? You cannot improve a blackberry by mashing it.