Clean Eating with Mise en Place

How does one eat clean, healthy food almost all of the time? Is it massive will power? Do clean eaters deny themselves every craving, sticking to a routine of boiled chicken breasts and bean sprouts until they are skinny? Universally, no. Even the most dedicated health nut, low on blood sugar and half-faint from hunger is going to be tempted by the short-term energy promise of the pastry case.

The way you eat quality, clean food almost all the time is to make the eating of that food unbelievably easy. And the way you do that is planning and preparation. How easy would it be to eat clean delicious food if this kind of thing was in your fridge all the time?


As a professional chef I learned the importance of what's called mise en place, which basically means having all your food prepared and ready to go when your restaurant service starts. In a restaurant kitchen that might mean having the garlic and onions pre-chopped, having the butter at room temperature, pre-blanching or roasting the vegetables as appropriate, making the stock reductions and bases for sauces, having the chicken and fish and meat cut into the right filets or steaks for service, etc. Mise en place is the reason why a restaurant kitchen can deliver a meal to you in 12 minutes that would take anyone, start to finish, 2 hours. Everything is ready to go when the cook needs it.

You can practically guarantee clean eating success for yourself if you take the concept of mise en place and embrace it for your home kitchen. Yes, this means you need to take an hour once or twice a week and get your prep work done.

When you get home with cart loads full of clean-eating fruits, veggies, meat (if you eat it), etc. take the time to turn your ingredients into your mise en place. Cut a pineapple into chunks, throw it in a tupperware and get it in the fridge. Make a batch of brown rice. Blanch or roast veggies. Put together a large salad. Make some hummus. In an hour you can turn several bags of groceries into components that will in turn become clean eating meals or snacks in a matter of minutes (sometimes seconds). And when you are hungry, the minutes you don't have to spend making food are the times you won't give in to the pastry case or drive-thru temptation.

Here's how you do it:
Preheat your oven to 450. Get a big pot of water boiling. If you have a rice cooker, break it out. Put brown rice or quinoa in the rice cooker. While the oven and water are heating, wash and chop veggies. Do a lot. As long as you are cutting up 1 head of broccoli, cut up 3.

Toss the "hard" veggies - broccoli, cauliflower, fennel, carrots, sweet potato, etc - with a little bit of olive oil and some salt and/or spices. Curry is great on roasted cauliflower, smoked paprika is dynamite on sweet potato. Place them on parchment or foil-lined sheet pans (keep the different veggies seperate because they'll all cook in different times).

When the oven is ready, stick the hard veggies in the oven and roast until tender and golden brown. Broccoli usually takes 12-15 minutes, sweet potato can take 40 depending on how big your pieces are. If you run out of sheet pans or oven space, just set the remainder aside. You can cycle a lot of veggies through an oven in an hour. Set a timer or several so you don't forget them in there.

For the "soft" veggies, I like to blanch, or cook then for just a minute or so in boiling water. Rinse and trim up your green beans, snap peas, asparagus (asparagus is equally delish roasted), etc. When your water is really boiling, add in your veggies. Do this one veggie at a time because, again, they cook at different rates. The soft veggies should take 90 seconds-2 minutes, max. Don't overcook! Pull them out with a big strainer and transfer them to another sheet pan to cool. Don't pour them out into a strainer in the sink, because then you have to refill your pot with water and bring it up to the boil again for the next veggie. Takes too much time and wastes energy. Just keep the water boiling and cycle through your veggies.

By the time you've finished cooking all your soft veggies your first batch of hard veggies will proabably be ready to come out of the oven. Just set the tray aside and let the veggies cool. If you need the sheet pan for another batch of roasted veggies, pull the veggies on their foil or parchment liner off the pan and let that cool on the counter. Re-line your pan, add more prepped veggies and you're ready to go!

Your water is still boiling but your soft veggies are all blanched. Throw some whole wheat pasta (if you don't eat wheat, an alterna-grain pasta is fine, or just skip this step) in the boiling water. Set a timer! You've got a lot of things working at this point...timers will help keep your pasta al dente. Err on the side of undercooking - the pasta will get reheated anyway. When it's done, drain well in a collander, toss with the lightest coat of olive oil, transfer to a container or big plastic bag and cool in the fridge.

Pasta, prawns and veggies cooling off after a batch of mise en place cooking:


Now it's time to move onto fruit. Wash your hands, knife, cutting board and fruit. Start chopping it into pieces that work for you. Bigger hunks are easier, and less surface area means the fruit will last longer, so that's what I go for. Chop up a pineapple or two, wash and dry (very well) some strawberries, then cut the tops off. Peel and cube a melon: watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew...whatever floats your boat. Wash grapes, dry (again, very well) and cut into small clusters. Grapes keep better with the stem attached, so unless I'm eating them right away I don't pull the stem off. As you finish with the fruit, transfer it to clean containers and stick in the fridge.


So now your fruit is in the fridge. Your pasta has been strained. Tons of roasted and blanched veggies are cooled and ready to go in the fridge. Rice or quinoa is coming out of the rice cooker. Your refrigerator is starting to look like the deli section of a super healthy gourmet market.


And later on when you really need a good quick meal, these components can be turned into an easy lunch or dinner in about 3 minutes. Like this:



Or this:


And your preparation will be worth it. An hour of your time will be payed back, in pounds you don't gain, guilt you don't feel, and money you don't spend on convenience food you shouldn't eat.