For the first day of vegetable week, you order a patty melt from Harlem Shake. The cheese fries and salted caramel milkshake are icing on top, they’re gravy, whichever food idiom best works with the salty and sweet combination of junk food.
This tendency to lean into the unhealthy, to indulge in the less healthy option, put distance between you and vegetables. Vegetables are rabbit’s food, a lame idiom with an aftertaste of starvation, over-restraint, suffocation. A nibble, not a chomp.
You grew up on Liz Lemon unhinging her jaw to shotgun a pizza the way other women, in your generation and before, were force-fed supermodels and diet articles.
Not that you didn’t read those Cosmo articles yourself. Walk down a paper aisle at CVS and the SELF, HEALTH, and WELL magazines frame muscular bodies, all tender and brown.
Yes, you are aware that your cooking vocabulary now infiltrates how you describe athletic humans. Is this the opposite of anthropomorphizing, comparing humans to the animals they eat? These models with caverns of tone in their thighs all oiled up, sweating under the light, like a rotisserie chicken.
How can the intended result be anything other than “delicious” in these photoshoots encouraging superhuman forms?
You digress.
For your adolescent form (and metabolism), embracing double doses of pizza and brownies was a small rebellion. A tiny, internal nudge of “I refuse to not eat.” Extra cheese, extra cookies, no restrictions. You still carried body insecurities: the little marsupial pouch of fat under the belly button you’ve worried about since pre-puberty, the arm jiggles, the chub rub of thighs like firewood.
Putting vegetables in the center of your meals at home or a restaurant felt like a concession, a punishment you opted out of.
But this blind spot has created its own blind spot of restraint.
Because vegetables, it turns out, are freaking awesome!!!
Of the euphoric rainbow of vegetables available, you learn a lot about what you haven’t even tried yet. You haven’t considered yourself a picky eater since you were a kid, preferring vanilla ice cream at McDonald’s and butter noodles everywhere else. You were five then. You consider yourself a pretty adventurous eater now, but what the heck is Romanesco? Do you know what apricots taste like? Dates? Parsnips? Rutabaga?
On the Sunday leading into vegetable week, you bring Luke through a drizzle to the local farmer’s market. With thirty minutes before the stands closed, most vendors stood arms crossed, slickers zipped, hoods up. Your own hood slid back and exposed your hair to the rain over and over until you let it, and your glasses dotted with precipitation that only smeared worse when you wiped them on your sweater, so the glasses disappeared into your pocket.
Even with your dismal eyesight, the produce is bright and visible. The piles of greens create a small garden. The apples, beets, and butternut squash you pick up from a Jersey Farm Stand wear clots of mud.
“Nothing else competes with these apples,” a man says. He’s enthusiastic enough that you assume he works at the stand. “The difference between these and the apples flown in from Washington or some place. My son won’t eat anything but these apples every morning.” He walks away with his plastic bag of apples, a farmer’s market fan. You buy a yellow Suncrisp, two red apples too big for your hands, and four Granny Smith apples. Your hands are tied. You will have to bake another apple pie.
At a stand exclusive to mushrooms, you buy a lion’s mane mushroom, a pillowy white brain smelling of earth. The word “peat” and its connotations of British castles come to mind. A polite dirt, slightly sweet, not too heavy. Its pieces roll off in ribbons, and you enjoy the bouncy texture of the raw shroom.
A bread vendor sells you a huge sourdough loaf. After you pay him, he asks if you like focaccia and throws a rosemary-seasoned loaf into your bag for free. The cheese woman eagerly describes every cheese she has, and you buy the creme fraiche. Luke makes a vocal “oh” at the cheddar curds vacuum-sealed in plastic, and those also find their way into your Wegman’s reusable bag. When microwaved briefly back at home, these are a “wow” warm delicacy.
When you pick up fennel, a platypus of vegetables (stalky like celery, fringy like dill, densely bulbous like an onion), a woman steps up and asks you how you plan to cook that. “It smells like tea, I thought it was tea,” she says.
You actually don’t know how you’re going to cook this, but you know she’s right about the sweet, licorice scent as the distinctive, show-stopping trait of the vegetable. How do you cook it, incorporate and complement something like this? How do you tackle all its different pieces and needs?
You’ll only find out by bringing it back to your own kitchen.
Tuesday: Butternut Squash Pasta
This recipe from Bon Appetit found its way into one of your too-many newsletters, which is convenient because you have butternut squash.
What better way to transition yourself into vegetables with the familiarity of a purée after soup week paired with the comfort of pasta.
But this recipe turns out to be the planes, trains, and automobiles of recipes. Beware of transposing the simplicity of recipe titles on the recipe itself!
The comment section, you discover, has announced its disdain for the extensive equipment required. A baking pan, a pot, another pot, a blender, and a casserole dish. All of this before dirty dishes and measuring cups. The dishwasher, then the sink fill up quickly.
“This was pretty tasty but not worth the massive amount of effort and many many pots and dishes. Hard pass,” Anonymous wrote in the comments.
Luckily for you, your kitchen is, shall we say, mainstreamed. Your equipment is limited. Casserole dishes? Blenders? Not in your kitchen.
Your cast-iron skillet, whom you love so much that you must think of a name for her…maybe Skilly, nests in the cabinets shrouded in a paper towel to protect her seasoning. For this recipe, she’s off the bench and back on the stove.
Though this recipe calls for hazelnuts, you have almonds, so you will roast a lightly-salted, already-roasted-in-a-factory almonds.
In the spirit of transparency about legumes…you don’t get nuts and seeds. Where is the flavor in them? Especially almonds, sucking up all the water in California, to still go through a factory where they are party-flavorized and dusted in some wacky over-seasoned powder for what? To still dry your mouth out? And you don’t even want to step foot into the almond mom stereotypes.
But you are willing to call a truce with nuts this week and give them a try.
You roast the almonds in Skilly, letting them oil up (like a delicious runner on a magazine cover). You put the almonds aside and use the thin layer of olive oil left to sauté the onions and garlic in preparation of adding chicken stock. Your soup roots are showing!
You want to go back to prepping the squash for a second. The inside of the squash is as bright as a good egg yolk, as a summer sunset. It’s striking, and you aloud “wow” at the creamy color. But peeling and dicing a curvy butternut squash is not the same as your practiced dice. The long, horizontal cut on a longer vegetable like this puts you back to square one. You’ve just started feeling comfortable with onion dicing, so you were due for a humbling.
The vertical cuts are uneven and shallow, leaving most cubes hinged together with a rind of viable squash. The cubes are not cubes but rectangles, little rows of squash baby teeth, and trapezoidal block. You only realize this now—because you apparently had barely read the recipe, only the comments complaining about poor seasoning (which, you would argue, can’t be the recipe’s fault if the cook didn’t know how to season properly)—but it’s all getting puréed in the end, so why do cubes even matter.
The squash goes in after the stock. Simmer, let it soften until the fork passes through the squash easily.
Pull out another pan to boil some pasta until it’s three minutes short of al dente. Salt that pasta water like your life depends on it, always! Like you’re an old-fashioned nonna who scoops your pot right into the ocean before putting it on the stove! (You don’t think any nonna, or person, really does this, but the image is cute.)
This only takes a few minutes, so you strain the rigatoni and eat the salty, borderline uncooked noodles like potato chips, popping one or two in your mouth while you watch the squash. (“Watch the Squatch” would be a great Big Foot fan club t-shirt slogan, if your intersection of readers also dabbles in conspiracy beasts.)
Around this point, when the squash is soft as needed, that you realize you’re on a roller coaster you can’t disembark. You need to blend this, and your blender is your enemy. This $6 Hamilton Beach blender turns things ugly or explosive. This college-days relic is not your friend, but alas, you will have to get on board. You’re already stuck with the mental math that this dish requires a casserole pan, which you don’t have, so you’re going to have to transition to one-pan-pasta with Skilly. (Like a good neighbor, Skilly is there.)
Over three batches of stock, onion, garlic, and squash in that tiny blender, you finally smooth out the butternut medley into a purée. Each batch, you worry that it will explode on you (again). You partially open the small slide opening at the top (a sippy cup innovation so the shake can get up and go with you to the gym, ugh). This lets some heat out, avoiding a vacuum seal explosion, but limits the amount that can fly out onto you. The machine pulses, and soon you have something that you can throw your pasta into.
Partially for kicks, partially to measure the pasta’s browning, you add a cheese crust on top. This meal quickly evolved to be less about vegetables than it is about pasta.
Oh yeah, those almonds. You chop them up with some cilantro and parmesan cheese for a topping. It adds a nice crunch to the soft pasta once it comes out and adds some color. Luke almost chokes on an almond, so a finer chop would do for next time.
Otherwise, the dish is creamy and cozy, and the butternut holds a slight variation on a tomato. This meal required some improvisation, some trust in the tools you did have and the palette you are training. Unlike the commentators trolling the recipe for blandness, you created something that worked for your taste. You and Luke douse bites with a lime wedge to see how acidity blooms the saltiness (or not), how it adds to the cilantro and almond toppings (or doesn’t). It’s like those dumb murder mystery games you love so much: it’s an investigation of finding out what these new things are and what they bring to the table.
Wednesday: Roasted Lion’s Mane & Fennel
Since When Cooking Begins inspired your “farmer’s wife / farmer’s market life” ambitions, it only felt right to turn to its vegetal recipes. This Romanesco roast felt like a good comp to roast the lion’s mane.
When you asked the farmer’s market vendor how he prepares his lion’s mane, he lifted a pinky with a gold band to indicate a three- to four-inch slice “against the grain, cooked in fat, lots and lots of fat.” Mushrooms will absorb whatever you roast them with, so if the mixture is watery, it risks sogging your mushrooms.
This little lion’s mane (mostly known for its potential mental health benefits against anxiety, depression, and dementia, go off girlboss) was exceptionally cute. You can’t really explain why this mushroom endeared itself to you. It has a squish and fuzziness of a good stuffed animal. It could fit in the crook of your arm while sleeping. It’s just cute.
But now, you must cook it.
You find yourself with garlic and extra ginger, so you chop those up and throw them into Skilly (back-to-back nights!). You lean into the olive oil coating, using enough that it ripples.
Once you read that rancid olive oil is so common in America that most people don’t know the difference between good and expired EVOO, and some might even prefer the taste of rancid olive oil. The industrial-sized tub of olive oil from the grocery store with no mention of its vintage or expiration tastes like nothing, so it might not be the target EVOO. But you will, of course, use every last drop of this fat quart in your pantry because you’re not a quitter and olives don’t grow on trees… in a figurative sense.
This also felt like the night to check out that fennel chilling on my counter with it’s three-headed-dog posture. As elegant as the recipe in your cookbook is, you end up googling “roast lion’s mane” and “roast fennel,” both of which give the general advice of “roast it.” After the lion’s mane has a great browned texture after a few minutes to , the fennel takes a bath in the same gingery olive oil to brown.
Both the fennel bulb, chopped into wedges like an onion sans stalks, and mushroom filets sit on a baking rack to go into the oven and cook for ten minutes.
Truthfully, despite your attempts at infusing your oil with a good flavor in the fresh ginger and garlic, you find that both the fennel and lion’s mane need more flavor. In mini espresso mugs, you pour ponzo then rice vinegar into them to serve as dipping sauces. They cook amazingly fast, which inspires a sense of optimism when it comes to weeknight vegetables. Compared to the six-part series of the noodles you loved, this cooking experience is a relief.
You wonder what you could have done to season them better, but ultimately, the dish is fine. The mushrooms have a meaty texture and soak up the ponzu, and fennel could have been roasted a little longer to become more tender.
But it was 100% vegetables, no starch/carb/cheese added to soften the blow! A small win!
Thursday: Buttery Beets & Grapefruit
Note: beets will stain everything, from your clothes and cutting boards to your digestive system. Assume, if you take on a beet recipe, it’s probably not a hemorrhoid.
With that PSA out of the way, this recipe (also from Carla Lalli Music’s Where Cooking Begins) was a wow moment, an exciting adventure of what a produce-exclusive meal can (and should) be!
If you’re talking endearing produce, these beets felt Pixar-level cute. They have little stubble! And odd little rattails! The rattails you are not 100% on board with (less for the haircut connotation, more for the closeness to its rodent namesake). The little prickles of beard, the dirt caked into its wrinkles, the long leaves and stems, the bright purple it bleeds onto everything.
If the lion’s mane had a regal whiff of British earth to it, beets smell like Americana dirt with a pinch of sweet.
“Hot little sugar dirt,” you affectionately name them.
…Are you flirting with your beets?
Anyway.
You discover the second most beautiful color as you slice into the grapefruit. The first slivers from the top and bottom of the grapefruit reveal a cell-like collection of juice pouches, wet enough to hallucinate a pulse. These discs channel biology lab microscopes from over ten years ago, the minor vibrations of something petite and stuck under a glass slide.
In the heart of the grapefruit, you find a bright red-pink, brilliant as a sun and marbled with pith. As you cut the edges away, rounding out the fruit and leaving only its red on the table next to the deep bloom of your beets, you have butterflies.
You pull out Skilly once again. The process on this is easy: sear the beets so they have a burned crust on the ends of their wedges while cooking them to tenderness. Once those are done, clear out the cooled pan with a light paper towel and add butter and grapefruit juice to create a brown butter pan sauce. Pickle some shallots as a topper. Douse grapefruit, shallots, and beets.
Here is the truth of this recipe by your notes:
You seared the beets over low-medium heat instead of medium-high, so the edges of the beets browned, but the heat didn’t reach the center. Most beets, when forking them off Skilly or later eating them, were very molar-intensive. You were afraid you would burn them if they stayed over heat, but you should have trusted the instinct that they were not fully cooked and let them be. Even though there’s no raw meat factor to worry about with vegetables, they still deserve to be cooked to an edible consistency.
That extra ginger you had the night before and decided to willy-nilly add to the lion’s mane roast? You needed that to add to the grapefruit juice. (Womp.) There’s a leathery ginger husk in your fridge (not where you should store it, it turns out). This ginger elder has been refrigerated, frozen, and re-refrigerated. When you grate it, because why throw something out that might still have an ounce of juice, the leathery ginger curses your name and condemns you to hell (so odd and quirky). The grating yields not a smidge of zest, so you throw the sliced corpse of this ginger in the compost bin. All this to say, ginger should be in the grapefruit sauce, and you did not do that. Would’ve been great, but you accidentally made other plans.
Those fennel stems? You decide that you will take those little fringe leaves like an herb to season alongside the leftover cilantro. These leaves leave your tongue and the back of your throat slightly numb. You may be allergic, but it’s too early to tell. They did not make it into the final recipe.
The shallot pickling is quick and dirty, which is great. Lots of salt, rice vinegar, and sesame oil. You douse this on top of the beets and grapefruits along with the butter pan sauce, and the sesame oil game-changed. Would recommend and incorporate all over the place.
The best part of this entire meal—besides the rich sweetness of the grapefruit with your earthy little sugar dirty beets, combined with the great salty and savory of the butter and sesame oil—was that all of these vegetables were technically in season (if your lesson is accurate). The salad is so light, refreshing, and acidic it confuses the mind to associate such a summery meal with December. Christmas in July? What about citrus in December? This was, you consider, “A Citrus to Remember.”
One phenomenal meal almost outdid your lactose bias. Almost. You always forget that butter is dairy, you see it as its own food group the way Buddy the Elf constructs his food groups around maple syrup. But this was produce-forward and loveable, a new venture for you.
This was an exciting revelation! You love beets! You would cook this every week!
Nailed it!
Post-beets, as you hand-wash the knife with your head in the clouds about beets, you somehow—and you really don’t know how despite being there—you miss sponging the knife and embed its newly sharpened blade into the back of your right pointer finger.
When Luke returns from taking out the trash, you’re silently sitting at the table with a paper towel around your finger. “I cut myself,” you say, trying to be chill.
You FaceTime your parents. They were going to call you because Chip and Joanna bought a library of books to decorate their home in Texas, and they thought you would love to have a library like that, wouldn’t that be funny?
And you tell them, “My cleaning got out of hand.”
You show your dad the cut, and he agrees. “Something did get out of hand.” (Luke giggles about this pun for the next two days.)
You run to the bathroom, Luke carrying your virtual parents on a phone screen behind you.
The marbling of that grapefruit comes to mind when you look your finger. “It’s deep,” you say.
You’ve been so, so chill up to this point, but now you’re resting your head on the sink ledge while running water over your finger. The plan is Luke will unearth the Gorilla Glue in your junk drawer and glue the seams of your skin together.
“Crest toothpaste is not a pillow,” your dad says, your head turned away from the sink and on your toothpaste tube.
“This is good content,” your mom cheerleads. She, like you, also doesn’t like blood and cuts, so she’s out of camera view, but she, like you, will peek even when she knows it will freak her out.
“If you’re going to drive, you’re going to hit the curb a few times,” your dad says. This cooking injury is par for the course.
That’s true, you think. You’re already imagining this scar will be kinda sick, a scar tissue tattoo from this chapter. The Gorilla Glue adheres you, and you think of all those Top Chef episodes that tease a chef cutting a finger before the commercial break, the blue gloves worn over the band-aid to allow them to continue.
Luke GoPuffs band-aids, Neosporin, and honey ice cream. You sit on the couch, your hand to your head like a faint little lady. You gave it your all, and you loved it. The band-aids will slip off over the weekend, you’ll have trouble using a pen without thinking you’re re-opening your wound, and you’ll call it “your Halloween finger” in the bar.
But it’ll make for a dope scar. A frowning yawn, an open-mouth singing an ode to beets.
Next week, I will teach myself about cooking fish. Despite my better instincts, I’m going big! I might filet a fish! Make some sushi! Learn what other fish you can eat besides canned tuna!