I think the food I hate eating most of all, that is entirely too common, is … watery vegetables. The following vegetables form a class in my mind that taste like mildly flavoured water and thus vile: celery, cucumber, peppers, bean sprouts and water chesnuts. Most of these vegetables are crunchy but they are certainly not satisfying like a crunchy potato chips. I have historically only been able to eat them when they been cooked to tenderness mush.
I have had a pretty good fruit habit. At the grocer’s on the weekend, I pick up five pieces of a few types of fruit – usually handheld ones like apples, oranges, pears, bananas and tomatoes and finger fruits like grapes, berries, baby carrots, cherries and tomatoes – and finish the haul by the end of the workweek. Because the fruit diversity is not so large (typically confined to apples, oranges and bananas on sale), I knew I need to diversify to vegetables.
Two of my colleagues at work are really inspiring. Andrea “meal preps” once or twice a week and she looks so disciplined with her baked lightly seasoned chicken breast in a small Ziplock bag and her raw vegetables in another. The results of her discipline are enviable. Lori seems to bring a cornucopia of vegetables to work and prepares her raw vegetables with some flair every day in the lunchroom. If Lori can do it, so can I!
I tend towards the do-it-once eat-all-week meal prep route and gave up hot lunches. I think the nutritional value of the vegetables is higher than a mixed green salad and the latter requires two liters of space in my satchel. I had several bottles of salad dressing lurking in the back of my fridge and as you can see from the image above, I started with dousing my vegetables!
Then I felt it was just messy to eat vegetables with all the dressing and I lightened up (below) or else I’ll be visiting the salad dressing aisle all too frequently.
Sometimes, I will feel like I have overdone it by lunch hour. Maybe I had a pastry for breakfast or some other incident that makes me want to eat clean (without dressing). And if I’m hungry enough, naked, flavourless vegetables will do. It took just three weeks to complete the transition from starting to prep vegetables like below and eating them naked as you see them below.
NPY has not joined me on this endeavour. He still gets hot lunches from leftovers from earlier in the week because he couldn’t fathom cold, meat- and carb-free lunches nor would he be full. Which is fine because then each hot dinner lasts all the longer when I’m not taking it for lunch!