I've been trying to eat healthy since sometime in middle school (before that I considered a full day of Captain Crunch and Peanut Butter 'n' Chocolate ice cream to be a perfectly acceptable diet).

My successes in this department were primarily limited to: deli turkey out of the bag, carrots and hummus, and microwavable cheese and broccoli packages. Low carbs and low effort! Cheers! Particularly because I needed another food group.

Salads... so many ingredients, all that bland lettuce, never really been my thing. California Pizza Kitchen can do a pretty good job with them, and the packaged ones at Trader Joe's get the job done too. But in my house? You want me to plan ahead, buy several different veggies and proteins, wash them, cut them up, and then be disappointed by how green my meal tastes and polish it off with ice cream? I'll get back to you tomorrow. Fortunately, the universe taught me how to make a salad and I didn't even know it was coming. I signed up for the local farmer's boxes last March, and received a $34 box of produce every week since then. A lot of the time I ended up with extra stuff I couldn't get to, or I was baffled about what to do with it (cabbage? a little bit on fish tacos would be alright but again, back to the planning issue), or intimidated (fennel is supposed to taste like black licorice!! I hate black licorice!! And it's so big!!) so things got tossed unused. Over time I warmed up to the adventure, and through conversation was given suggestions for how to use some of these strange exotic plants like parsley. As I began to realize that most of them were, in fact, not strange or exotic, it became easier to throw a little bit of each on top of my lettuce (organic lettuce and Safeway lettuce are two entirely different foods) ... and it didn't taste so bad. Today I realized I had done this, oh, maybe 3 times, but that that is enough times to be a girl-who-makes-salad. But it didn't happen naturally or overnight. I had to jump into the deep end of the produce world without my water wings and touch a lot of moldy veggies on the way.