With Summer’s Harvest at Its Peak, Odd but Good Advice

Even the best among us need a break sometimes.

Allison, for instance, has enthusiastically embraced a diet focused on all the best foods:  lively vegetables and fruits, wholesome whole grains, lean proteins, healthful fats and satisfying beans and nuts.  In fact, she’s journeyed long enough that root beer, her former nemesis, is no longer even a credible temptation.  In other words, her taste buds have been transformed into allies, exactly as described in an earlier post.

Sounds picture perfect–except for one thing:  vegetable exhaustion.  At our last Whole Kitchen class, she confessed that she’d hit a vegetable chopping wall the night before.

I knew exactly what she meant!  About every 10th day I hit the same wall.  The lesson I’ve

Frozen vegetables, like these chopped onions, lighten the load on nights when you're facing vegetable exhaustion.

learned?  Don’t beat yourself up just because you occasionally want a healthful meal with minimal effort.  Give yourself a break instead, with frozen vegetables from your freezer pantry or with pre-cut veggies from a salad bar.

Don’t worry that utilizing a few healthful modern conveniences will lure you onto the slippery slope back down to a fast food diet.   Quite the opposite is true.  Refreshed after a break, you’ll be anxious to once again create colorful, flavor-full, meals with fresh vegetables–which is an especially good thing right now, at the peak of the summer harvest.  Don’t let vegetable exhaustion keep you from the season’s gorgeous produce any longer than need be.

Need a good, take-a-break recipe?  Check out the next post for “Creamy Gingered Peas and White Fish,” an easy but tasty meal-in-one dish.

Also see this post on dealing with Vegetable Exhaustion.