Hi y’all, hope you’ve had a good day, so far. It’s a weekend and some of us may have a bit of cooking to do. I’m hoping, praying and keeping my fingers crossed that veggies will feature in this cooking spree

Here are our top five tips for handling and cooking our vegetables in a healthy way.

• When you buy vegetables in the market, buy them whole. Do not have them cut in the market. When you do this, you are exposing the very fragile water soluble vitamins in the vegetables to the air and denaturing them. And then you still have to wash them before use…this leads to bleeding out of the essential nutrients through the cut ends of the vegetables.

• Then do not fry or over cook the vegetables. Just lightly steam them in a pot with some spices as desired. Heat can actually break down and destroy 15-20% of some of the vitamins in vegetables.

• Research has shown that for vegetables like carrots, boiling is the best way of preserving the nutrients in carrots and sweet potatoes. Be sure to leave their skins on until after cooking. The anti-oxidant effect of tomatoes are also more pronounced after cooking.

• Stir-frying. As the name suggests, this involves lightly greasing a pan with oil and continually stirring your thinly cut vegetables or cubed chicken breasts. Emphasis on the words lightly greasing. For best for best results and shorter cooking time, use a really hot pan or wok

• Poaching. You can poach your vegetables in hot fluid…could be hot water, hot vegetable or meat stock. This preserves the nutrients and gives awesome flavour especially when poached in stock.

So, cook away…to your heart’s content!