Jennifer Cornbleet: If you know you have a really busy week ahead you may want to prepare a few things in advance on the weekend, some of the raw food dishes that keep really well include patties, salad dressings, desserts and almond milk and non dairy beverage made from soaked almonds and water and am going to show you how to do that in just a minute.

You can also prepare a few seasonings in advance a lot of recipes call for a table spoon off lemon juice or a clove of fresh garlic minced onion and parsley are also common seasonings and these items keep for five days in your refrigerator see you could just go ahead and prepare those in the beginning of the week and then it would be really easy to flow together a lot of different recipes.

So let me go ahead and juice a little bit of lemon from my week here and you can just go ahead and store this lemon juice in a little jar or container in your refrigerator and even it freezes really well if want to keep it around for a little bit longer, crushed garlic minced parsley and minced onion can be prepared very quickly in a food processor you just place coarsely chopped parsley or peeled garlic cloves or junks of onion right in the processor and just pulls the couple of times until its finely chopped. But if you don’t want to clean the food processor you can also quickly mince an onion by hand for your week.

So let me show you how to do that, first am going to peel the onion am cutting of one end of the onion and then am scoring the peel I mean am just making a small cut into the peel itself all the way around the onion and then the peel easily comes off.

Now that the onions peeled I am going to cut it in half but am leaving this end on and that’s going to hold the onion together as I finely chopped or mince it so now to begin I am going to make cuts along these natural grew that you see on the half the onion and I am going all the way down to the board that I am not going through this end right here because I want the onion to hold itself together to make it easier for me to chop it, I am making one cut through the center of the onion just to make a finer dice or cube and I am going to begin the slice the onion and using the down and through technique pushing the middle of my blade down and forward and you can see the onion Is coming out already diced or in small cubes.

So now that I got the diced onion I can go ahead and use the fan technique to mince it, mince just means very finely chopped and so again I am placing the tip of my knife on the for side of the pile I am moving the base of the knife up and down quickly just feathering it in a fan motion mixing that onion its looks like about a cup of onion which is easily en halved from one or two people to use this in the seasonings in different dishes during the week.

Some recipes go for soaked nuts and seeds non dairy milks and patties are couple of those recipes soaking nuts and seeds is something that you can do in advance and it is very easy to do you just place any nut or seed into a mason jar filling it about a half way and then filling the rest of the jar with water and you let it set on your canner top that wouldn’t have over night or 48 hours and at the next morning drain of the water give it a rinse and you can either use this soak nuts or seeds in a recipe right away or you can store them in your refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Almond milk is a tasty non dairy beverage made from soaked almonds and water and it’s a great to use either just straight as placement or you can pour it in cereals as well to make almond milk am going to use a blender am combining almonds along with some water, and then I am going to add some dates these are some natural dates that are very soft and sweet dates and they are going to sweetened this almond milk if you want an UN sweetened milk you could leave that out or you could use a different natural sweetener of you choice, so go ahead and add those in you could also flavor this with some vanilla extract if you wanted to there’s a lot of variations you can even use different nuts and seeds preserve that milk is very delicious and so sets the milk.

So now go ahead and blend this so now I want to strain it we have this thick almond mixture and I want to extract the milk from this mixture so I am going to be using a mesh bag, which works really well to strain nut milks, but if you don’t have one of these you can simply use a fine mesh strainer held over a bowl and pour the almond milk into that. So here we go pouring it in here, secure the bag, give a little of twist so that nothing gets out and now am going to milk the almonds so am just squeezing this bag from the bottom and from the top but I am milking the almonds and how is coming this delicious creamy almond milk that is so good on its own or poured over cereal.

So with almond milk a couple of patties and salad dressings and dessert and some of your seasonings prepared in advance you will be set for week.