Throw Your Vegetables Away Immediately If You Notice This

If you shop at the farmers' market, you may get giddy when you see beautiful-looking vegetables. Once you buy them, you might come up with lots of ideas of how you'll turn them into a dish, such as a soup, salad accompaniments, a side dish, or a main course. When you get home, however, you may put everything away in the fridge and realize your ideas aren't going to work out. Perhaps you shop once a week at the grocery store or shop online, and you have more vegetables than you know what to do with in your fridge. Don't worry, it happens to the best of us.

When you reach into your fridge to finally make one of the dishes you had hoped to make earlier in the week, you may find that the veggies aren't as fresh as when you picked them up. Maybe you'll quickly use up your vegetable ingredients by making a big pot of soup or roasting them in the oven. These are simple and easy ways to use up vegetables that only have a few days left before they're ready to be tossed in the compost bin. Typically, when veggies go limp or wilt, it's a sign that they're not as fresh as when you purchased them.

If you find a head of broccoli in the back of the fridge and you're wondering if it's still good, there is usually one key sign that tells you it's beginning to go bad. Although it may be an obvious sign, many people may not realize that it's going bad when there isn't mold growing on it.

So how do vegetables let you know they're starting to go bad? Well, they usually begin to have hues of yellow throughout. If you've ever left a head of broccoli in your fridge for too long, you've likely noticed yellow spots. You can still eat broccoli that has patches of yellow, but you may notice that the flavor is bitter as it begins to lose nutritional value (per First For Women). Kale usually lasts 1-2 weeks in the fridge, but will have splotches of yellow when it begins to wilt. It will also be more bitter, so although it's safe to eat, your taste buds may reject these green veggies, according to SF Gate. 

You may want to scrap your plans to use these ingredients for dinner or lunch and toss the leafy green vegetables in the compost bin. There's no sense in spending time on a meal, only to find that it's too bitter or not to your liking because the produce is not at its freshest.