I grew up remembering vegetables as foods to be tolerated, not savored. I would like to blame this memory of vegetables on the bland diets of the Midwest, but I can't really do that as a child of Indian immigrants whose mother was not only a fabulous cook but also a stay-at-home mom up until her children's early teen years. Somewhere in adulthood, my opinion of vegetables moved from toleration to respect, and then from excitement and finally to all-out love. These days, as I prepare meals, I think less about the "main course" and more about the sides. What vegetables will we eat? How many different colors can I sneak onto the dinner plate? How shall I prepare them? Can we do more than one dish of greens?
Translating this love for vegetables has become a goal of sorts through a six-week series of food preparations and tastings that my husband Jim and I are doing for the food pantry at the Franklin Community Center in Saratoga Springs. The series grew out of a collection of thoughts (seeds, if you will) centered on how social justice through food security: encouraging donations of healthy, local produce to food pantries and other social service organizations; helping recipients of such donated items understand the foods in terms of their affordability and nutritional value; and, finally, diversifying the pool of "typical" shoppers at farmers markets as a way of making the credo of "from farm to fork" more than just a buzzword for the affluent.
When my husband proposed that he and I prepare foods that we grow in our back yard and offer recipes and free tastings to food pantry regulars, the response was enthusiastic. But with the enthusiasm came some warnings. The preparations had to be very simple, involve no more than four or five ingredients, and should feature vegetables that, unlike, say bitter melon and kohlrabi, are easily recognizable.
Last week, we kicked off the series with the featured vegetable: kale. We steamed one batch in water, added some lemon juice to a second batch, and apple juice to a third batch. We handed out samples, which people politely tried and seemed to like. We timed the preparations and realized that we had scored very high on the scales of simplicity and affordability. The dishes we served cost less than $1 to make, and the preparation time -- including washing and chopping up the vegetables -- was about three minutes.
But would these dishes make people fall in love with kale? Sampling the leafy, fibrous greens myself, I had my doubts. The kale we made was like the infamous spinach that a lot of adults who were children of the 60s and the 70s might remember from their childhoods. A green thing that was good for you, but didn't particularly seem to taste distinctive, innovative, or, for lack of a better word, special.
So this week we switched strategies, and tried turnips. Equally boring in name and reputation. But when prepared four different ways, truly one of the most delicious root vegetables around.
We started with the green tops. We chopped them off the turnip bulbs, washed them and shook them dry. We then chopped them up, and dry-roasted them on a flat skillet with a dab of canola oil (which prices out to be about one-fourth of the price of olive oil and in many cases tastes just as good), and a few mustard, fenugreek, and cumin seeds.
"Wow, that's got a kick," exclaimed one taster. "I never even thought you could eat the greens. I just threw them away."
Step two was a simple sauté. We sliced up a turnip, sautéed it in the oil and added a small sprinkle of salt.
"Pretty good," one person intoned. "And really simple to make."
The third step was a stir-fry. Although I was tempted to really go to town and cook the turnips with onion, garlic, carrots, peas, and ginger and turmeric, I remembered simple and stuck to oil, a bit of cumin seed, and shredded cabbage. We hope that as we write the recipes out into a booklet, we'll be able to encourage others to see the stir-fry method as a way of cooking together vegetables of a wide variety that might be sitting in a home refrigerator or of putting leftovers to good use.
The fourth and final preparation was a baked turnip. Like a baked potato, I explained. I wrapped the bulb in aluminum foil and put it in the oven for about 30 minutes. The result. "That's a turnip?" one person asked. "It's so soft, and so good."
The series continues next week with yellow crookneck squash, zucchini, an perhaps one or two other kinds of squash.
No comments:
Post a Comment