"How like life is the endive, well shaped but ah…so bitter."
I’m
eating vegetables. I’m not particularly proud of this fact but it’s the
truth. I have eaten more vegetables since starting my diet last Monday
than in the previous six months. And not the fun vegetables either, the
green ones. No corn, no potatoes, no carrots and no peas. I can,
however, eat kale, cabbage and kohlrabi to my hearts content. Kohlrabi?
Great, now I have to “google” vegetables to find out just how much I’m
going to hate eating them. For the record Kohlrabi is a German turnip with the taste and texture of a broccoli stem. A broccoli stem? Yum! Give me more of that!
I
take solace in knowing that my green, leafy aversion is typical of many
brought up in my class (blue collar) and my country (the good ‘ol USA)
and that many of us were trained to dislike vegetables almost from
birth. If your ethnic background, like mine (German/Irish), was one
whose default method of vegetable preparation was boiling until
unrecognizable, chances are your veggie hating ways were pretty much set
at a very young age. I was in my late teens before I discovered that
some cultures actually found ways to make their veggies delicious. In
defense of my flavor challenged ancestors I will admit that it’s hard to
think of interesting ways to cook food while fighting with Mrs. O’Brian
over the last spud in Ireland. People who grew up hungry really don’t
care a whole lot about taste, as I was constantly reminded throughout my
childhood:
There are children starving in Armenia who would kill for your creamed spinach.
My pleas to send the food to the Armenians and end the Great Creamed Spinach Famine of the mid 70’s fell on deaf ears.
I’m
sure that I will eventually reap the benefits of eating a wider variety
of veggies as soon as my body remembers how to process roughage. But I
digress. Vegetables are our friends and almost any of them can be
rendered eatable with enough garlic and olive oil.
Oh yeah. Anybody know how to cook a chayote?
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