Like you I was tired of painstakingly removing the leaves off my green leafy vegetables. ;)

I built this little device as a timesaver in the kitchen. It works by threading your leafy vegetables' stalk through a hole just larger than the stalk, pulling off all the leaves from the gross woody or chewy stalk. As a bonus, it doubles as a cutting board.

This project is super simple to build and makes cooking a little bit quicker.

Step 1: Tools and Material

For this project, I used the following tools and materials:

Drill
Spade bits
Semi-flexible cutting mat
Bar clamps to secure work
Sacrificial wood board to drill into - I used a junked piece of wood from outside my studio

That's it. This whole project took a quick 10 minutes to make and clean up.

Step 2: Secure the Cutting Mat

Make sure that the cutting mat isn't going to slip around when you're drilling into it. If the pieces aren't properly secured, your drill or your material can skip around and spin while you are trying to drill.

I used two bar clamps to secure the cutting mat on top of a piece of sacrificial board on top of my work bench.

Step 3: Drill!

After your pieces are secure, you can begin making holes. Using a spade bit is pretty great, but takes some getting used to if you've never used one before. It begins by digging out the center of your materal, then the outside radius as you apply pressure.

Make your way through the spade bit index making holes. I only went up to 1" because I couldn't imagine a vegetable with a stalk larger than 1". If I ever find one, I'll add another hole :)

Step 4: Clean-up

All the stringy bits should just be able to be picked away by with your fingers. For the smaller holes, you may need to make more than one pass with the drill to get the cleanest cut.

For stubborn plastic shavings, you can try removing them with an Exacto blade.

Step 5: Try It Out

Huzzah! It works!

This little kitchen helper is great for herbs too. I eventually added a few smaller holes with regular drill bits to remove tiny leaves off of the thin stalks of thyme and rosemary.