Twenty
five years ago, I wanted a salad spinner, but did not have room—or the money—to
buy one. So, I made one. I took one of the cloth storage bags I had made for
backpacking (why buy fancy ones when you can sew them for free from scraps?),
put the washed greens in it, took it outside, and swung it around my head by
the drawstring. Voila— clean, dry lettuce with a pre-soaked storage bag for the
left-overs. And it was fun. I never
looked back.
Now,
I have a whole series of bags. The old ones finally died, so I broke out the
sewing machine last summer and made some new ones. I made several from old—or
kind of tacky—dish towels that I was not using. The thicker terry cloth
material works really well for salad greens. I have a large one from an old
tablecloth with a hole in the middle that holds huge leaves of mustard and
kale, as well as smaller cooking greens. And then there are some scraps of
cotton cloth bags that corral carrots, beets, and mushrooms from market to
table. I weave shoelaces through a tube in the top of the bag for drawstrings
so that I can pull the bag closed.
I
have found that these cloth bags work much better than plastic. Greens rot and
grow slimy in plastic bags because they cannot breathe. They dry out—or tumble
out of the refrigerator at awkward times—when left unwrapped and held together
by the wire wrappers, which bruise the stems. But in a dampened cloth bag,
greens last for over a week—which is all I ask from a vegetable. Even root
crops are happier. If one does dry out,
or grow nasty because it was pushed to the far back corner of the shelf, I toss
the bag into the wash and use it again. And then, when we go hiking and I need
one more bag to hold the last day’s food—there they are, ready and waiting to
hit the trail.
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