I’m usually a little overwhelmed after a trip to Aldi because I buy a lot of fresh produce, enough for the week or longer, and I don’t usually have a place to put it all.

If I cram it in my frig without processing it first (or just leave it to sit out), I end up with gushy fruits and vegetables to compost before my next shopping trip. The key (for me) in meal prep is accessibility, which means washed and ready to go.

So here’s what it looks like when I start…

 

I set out as many bowls and colanders as I can find…

And fill them with fresh produce from Aldi…

The trash and recycling is easily sorted and goes straight to the bins in one quick trip…

I preempt pesky stickers from ending up in the sink drain, stuck to the floor, or littering the compost…

 

I wash the containers in a clean sink…

And set them to dry…

I remove anything that prevents unfettered access to my ingredients…  

I rinse the eggs and store 36 in frig shelf…

This pretty much just makes me happy 🙂

I assembly wash everything to the counter on the other side of my sink with the hottest water possible to reduce cross-contamination with pesticides while the food in stored in my kitchen. Plus, it’s ready to eat, cook, serve!

And here’s how it looks after I’m done…

And that’s how I come home from Aldi . . . except I left out the part where I stand at my kitchen sink hulling strawberries and rinsing and filling freezer bags of fresh fruit for smoothies, for hours!

Hope this helps; Happy Aldi Shopping!

Why do I wash my eggs & containers?

It’s easy to do right then and saves time later…

I get rid of the cartons and containers because they’ve been in my shopping cart…which I imagine has been touched by hand bags recently removed from restroom stalls, shopping bags that have been all over the city and on the floors,kids shoes, diapers and potty training pants, potted plants, fertilizer and pesticides, bird poop, raw meat packaging, leaky milk, and everything else that has been transported on truck beds to warehouse floors to grocery store display shelves…

They’ve also been handled by stockers, checkers, and baggers, and my grimy shopping hands.

I wash the eggs, first and foremost, because they come from a CHICKEN! You know, that’s a little scary, especially if you’ve ever watched a YouTube video about it!

After they come from the chicken, they roll around in chicken coup…with chicken poop.

Then they get handled by humans and machines.

Then they get bleached…I like to wash off the bleach because I’m not a bleach girl anymore.

Any “occasionally” I have mishaps with my eggs…like when several of these ended up on the bottom of my Aldi shopping cart today, thanks to the toddler at the helm running out of cheese sticks and other sources of entertainment before we got back to the car!

My previous food prep routine was to open a box, container or carton after setting it directly on my kitchen counter…

I might throw out a damaged egg that had leaked into the rest of the carton, assuming I was being vigilant for my safety, never mind whether salmonella was already developing on the carton and shells of the intact eggs, and then crack them directly on the side of the frying pan, picking out any pieces of shell that fell in.

I used to not have a care in the world…

-RM