How to store your produce like a pro

1.  Remove the Leafy Greens from roots and bulbs: The greens that come attached to carrots, beets, radishes, kohlrabi, and the like are edible, but if they’re kept intact, they’ll continue to suck up nutrients to keep themselves alive. This means your carrots or beets will quickly soften and go bad, having given all their goodness to the greens, rather than saving it for you. So cut the greens off as soon as you get them. Then you can enjoy eating both the greens and the roots or bulbs.

 2.  Use the flimsy stuff first: Save the sturdy stuff for another day. For example, spinach won’t keep, but cabbage, cauliflower, beets and carrots will. If you’re not sure, you can look things up at StillTasty.com, or just learn through experience as you go.

 3.  Keep some sort of dip on hand at all times: On delivery day, wash and cut up whatever seems dippable: carrots, snap peas, cucumbers, broccoli, sweet peppers, etc. (If you like to dip wet things like cucumbers, it’s best to cut them up the same day you’ll eat them; they’ll spoil quickly.) Keep dip and cut-up veggies front and center in the fridge for folks to grab for quick snacks.

 4.  Use your vegetable drawers the Right Way: If you have two vegetable drawers, count yourself lucky! Set one on high humidity, and the other on low humidity. Then, store each thing in the drawer that will prevent its unique type of spoilage. Things you want to stay crisp (lettuce) go in the high humidity drawer. Things that you can envision turning moldy (peppers) go in the low humidity drawer.

 5.  Prep Lettuce Greens for storage right away: Take the heads apart and wash and spin dry all the leaves in batches (I usually also have to lay them between paper towels to absorb the remaining water). When they’re really dry, I remove the paper towels put the lettuce in Ziplock freezer bags, flattened with all the air squeezed out, and into my high humidity vegetable drawer (if you have one). They last at least a couple weeks, maybe longer.

 6.  Storing Fresh Herbs: Loosely wrap them in a damp paper towel and keep them in a tightly sealed container or ziplock bag in the fridge to prevent oxygen from entering and the leaves from wilting