More Kitchen Management Tips and Insights on Community Shared Agriculture From One of Our Subscriber Moms

Toni Tiu works in marketing and advertising, and she is a mom who lives with her husband, son, and her parents. She is also one of the subscribers whom we’ve had the pleasure of getting to know over the course of her getting a tampipi every other week.

In Part 2 of our conversation with her, she shared more tips on kitchen management including how she cooks the vegetables and the order in which she cooks them. (Check out part 1 and part 3 of our conversation with Toni.)

Some hacks she offered are how you can enjoy the vegetables and their essence even if you have a simple oven toaster. You can roast the produce with a little olive oil and sprinkle some salt to taste.

Tip#2: Classics always work

For Toni, experiencing the different colors, textures and tastes of the fruits and vegetables sparks her creativity. She sees it as a mental break from work, spending 30 minutes before each meal to research and get ideas for what to create with the vegetables.

Subscribe to our vegetable delivery service in Manila for your family while helping urban poor families. Get a Gulay Pambahay pack when you order our Gulay Para Sa Lahat Share.

Read the transcript for Part 2 of our conversation with Toni

Toni: Yes, my second tip would be classics always work. By classics i mean just simply roasting the vegetables. I’m not a big fan of putting sauces and other ingredients that are heavy on flavor.

When it comes to veggies, I want to enjoy real taste of the veggies as much as possible. So there’s steaming which is much healthier. But I like the little char that roasting brings. So what I do is I just preheat our oven toaster, it doesn’t even have to be the big oven. I preheat it to 220 and then I just line the tray with aluminum foil so the veggies don’t stick, drizzle some oil on it and then I put the chopped vegetables

Any veggie in the tampipi would roast beautifully, you just have to adjust the time. So, what i do is i put the veggies there. Then I sometimes put a little herbs. So, you had rosemary one time, right? I chopped up the rosemary and just sprinkled it over and then drizzled it with oil again and then roasted it for 30 minutes. And then that’s done it’s beautiful it’s flavorful

Very simple any cook can do it. You know i’m not a professional cook, but I love playing around in the kitchen. And it’s one of the easiest but most flavorful ways you can enjoy your veggies.

Char: Cool!

Toni: Yeah it uses less power and so an oven toaster is perfectly fine.

Char: So you usually do roasting and you said steaming. Which vegetables do you steam?

Toni: You can steam anything! But the the last ones I had steamed were the french beans. So we just use a teamer or like a double boiler. We bring the water up to boiling point and then put the what you call this the vegetables on top of the (I don’t know what you call the pan with the hose).

Char: Yeah the basket.

Toni: And let it steam for like five to ten minutes, not even not even more than five minutes. Like three to five minutes. Because I love it when the vegetables are still crisp when you bite into them but you know they’re cooked already. So three to five minutes depending on what vegetable you’re steaming. But for the french beans, in particular, that’s how we enjoyed it and then we just lightly lightly salt it before serving to just bring out more of the flavor. And it’s wonderful with rice or just eat it on its own with whatever ulam you also have.

Char: Wow!

Advertisement