Making Your Side Vegetable into Your Main Meal

I think there's probably nothing more depressing than seeing your food go rotten.  It was happening all last week, first my bread, then my tomatoes and cucumbers.  Why? Honestly, cause on my own I don't eat have as much and don't go through all the food in a week.  So I realized that what I needed to learn was not how to cook with different ingredients but how to make different meals with the same ingredients. 

One of my favorite vegetables to eat is cactus, aka nopalez.  However when I cooked them I realized that it would take me at least a week to finish them on my own, the way I usually eat them, so I asked my friend, Kee, if she wanted to join me for dinner ;)   Thanks to her I now know how to make my cactus the main part of my meal.  Rather than cook them with onions and put them on the side, I can turn them into a cactus salad by adding lemon juice, pepper, and salt.  Immediately I could finish 1-2 big bowls of this no problem.  Helps when I don't have a lot of meat or have to eat a lot of vegetables before they go bad.