Fruit and Vegetable Wash

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Instant Liquid Soap is the perfect stovetop cleaner. It's gentle on your hands while being tough on built up, caked on grease. Click here to read How to Clean your Greasy Stovetop using zero waste natural soap methods

  1. Tear open pouch at notch
  2. Fill pouch with water to top of label. Gently stir.
  3. Pour into a reused plastic bottle. Use.

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An effective fruit and vegetable wash is a necessary kitchen accessory. You definitely want to make sure you clean off all of the soil from your fruits and vegetables, but you definitely don't want any soap residue or chemical odors left on your food. The reason you cook is to have great tasting food that's good for you too.

Fruit and vegetable wash also works beautifully on your farm fresh eggs.

How do you clean greens?

lettuce flashy trout back

The best way to clean lettuce, especially fresh picked lettuce:

Make sure you wash it well before dressing up your salads. When you buy lettuce in the store, that's been packed in plastic packaging, it's already been washed a few times, with water from a questionable source. Fresh picked organic lettuce, is dirty.

Fill a bowl with drinking water and add 1 drop of Instant Liquid Soap. Rinse the lettuce in this water.

Dump the dirty water, fill your bowl with clean drinking water again. This time do not add the 1 drop of Instant Liquid soap.  Rinse the lettuce a 2nd time. Repeat this step one more time and your lettuce should be ready for your salad plate.

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I use the Instant Liquid soap at full strength as a fruit and vegetable wash and wash them just like I'll wash a dish. I scrub root vegetables like potatoes, especially if I want to eat the skins. Carrots, celeriac, turnips, etc. Zucchinis, cucumbers, and  winter squashes many times grow laying on the ground, tomatoes have the fine green dust, eggs can have dirt or small microscopic amounts of poop, melons which will harbor tiny bits of dirt in the crevices, eggplants will have mud splatters.

Click here for Dehydrated Watermelon instructions.

For other fruits and vegetables, the fruit and vegetable wash is a small amount of liquid soap diluted in a bowl of water to rinse off excess dirt. Leafy greens, lettuces, beens, cabbages, and the like simply need a rinse and a tiny bot of soap will take care of any pathogens. I'll rinse these types of foods under running drinking water with soapy hands or dip in a bowl of water with literally 1 drop of soap in it, and then rinse again.

Fruits and vegetables peels

It's a good idea to really wash your fruits and vegetables, even if you are going to peel them, so no dirt touches the yummy food that you will eat.

I sometimes use the peels separately from the rest of the fruit or vegetable. For instance, I like to peel my tomatoes for sauce, but make sure I've washed off the green dust so my chickens can enjoy my scraps. The green tomato dust is toxic to them.

I'll use carrot peelings as weights when fermenting vegetables. 

When I make potato chips, I'll wash and peel the skins off, and make a separate set of potato skin chips for Andy, who loves potatoes, but needs to watch his sugar intake. The potato tuber is high in starch and sugar, but the peelings are high in iron and potassium, so potato skin chips are an excellent snack for him. The recipe is below!

Butternut squash to be scrubbed before cutting it open.
celeriac tops washing in a bowl of water with a few Instant Liquid Soap drops, to be used as fermenting weights
Carrot peels soaking in a bowl of water with a few soap drops to be used as a cover under the fermenting weight
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Potato chip recipe

Washed potatoes drying for storage
Washed potatoes for chips. See the scars etc? This will shorten their storage life, which is why they are selected for making into potato chips.

Preheat your oven to 350℉.

  1. Scrub your potatoes. I use the scrubby side of a sponge and a tiny bit of Instant Liquid Soap. I wash my potatoes with the very best fruit and vegetable wash, because potatoes grow in deep down in the soil. I know when I harvest my potatoes, I hose off most of the soil outside in the yard, but some remains.
  2. You can leave the skin on and skip this step, or peel your potatoes, and make potato skin chips with them. This is my preference.
  3. Slice the potatoes about  1/16th-1/8th" thick.
  4. Place the potatoes in a colander and rinse them. This washes off some of the starch, making the chips a bit lighter and crisper. If you want, you can collect this water, and water your plants or use the starchy water in a bread recipe.
  5. I leave the potatoes for a bit to dry, by laying them on a clean linen tea towel.
  6. Place the in a bowl and drizzle some olive oil on them. Toss the potato slices to evenly coat them
  7. Sprinkle salt, pepper, onion powder, hot pepper, etc. to taste.
  8. Place the potato slices on a baking sheet pan or cookie sheet, in a single layer and bake for 10-15 minutes, until they are golden brown. Turn them over, and bake for another 5 ish minutes. 

Bon appetite!

potato chips
potato skin chips