Cooking vegetables for the vegetable-adverse, remedial

What kind of eater are you?

My favorite meal is:

   1) at a restaurant

   2) one grandma used to make

   3) healthy 

   4) anything with chocolate on it

I eat:

   1) 3 squares a day, with snacks

   2) All-day, grazing

   3) when my body says I’m hungry

   4) when there’s chocolate

The number of calories I consume is:

   1) way more than necessary

   2) anywhere from 800 to 3000

   3) exactly as many as my body needs

   4) I do not believe in calories.

If the majority of your answers were 1 or 2, you’re a normal eater. All you 3s? You’re not a real person. I refuse to believe people like you exist. And you 4s? You are a character in a Cathy comic strip. You’re not, you say? Look in the mirror. Is there a third-dimension? Didn’t think so.

I have food issues. I either think about food constantly or don’t think about it at all. I veer between well-planned, nutritionally balanced menus to days when I eat nothing that can’t be spread on a Triscuit. It isn’t healthy, and it isn’t wise, but that’s one of the wonderful things about food. It changes by necessity. Recipes can be tweaked and twisted, as anyone who owns the cookbook “50 Ways To Cook Artichokes” knows. 

Every January I pledge to eat better, and if the media is to be believed I am far from alone. But eating better is a learned behavior. And it often begins by cooking healthier food, something that can be self-taught. We can all chop up some broccoli. It’s the process of getting it into our mouth and keeping it there that is the challenge.

Begin where you’re comfortable. Tiny pieces of celery in soup is the best you can do? Start there. Tomato sauce on pasta. It’s a step up from the universal vegetable delivery system of ketchup, I guess. It doesn’t matter where you start. It’s one meal. One day. Tomorrow you can add a few tiny pieces of carrot in there with the celery. 

Vegetable aversion is a real thing and it takes time to conquer. It also takes some skill. Haters have not learned to prepare the hated properly. So learn. Google it. Watch YouTube videos. Lock yourself in a room with a computer if you feel shamed, but know this. No one is born knowing how to cook vegetables. People who love vegetables were just like you once. 

We all start somewhere. Try starting here, with pureed cauliflower. It kind of looks like mashed potatoes. But you absolutely need a food processor to create something that doesn’t look like a vegetable. There are no quantities in the recipe, no 1/2 teaspoon of this or cup of that, because now is the time to be dangerous in the kitchen. If we must eat right, we might as well have an adventure while we’re doing it.

Pureed Cauliflower

1 head of cauliflower, cut into little pieces

Butter

Milk/buttermilk

Salt

I should probably say that you’re cutting off the flower part. You’ve already gotten rid of the green leaves and now you’re cutting it away from the core. If you knew that was necessary, you should probably not be reading a remedial article. Boil those pieces until you can stick a fork in them. They’ll be the consistency of ice cream, your fork goes in easily but there is some resistance. (If you do not want to get a pot dirty, invest in those Ziploc Steamer Bags. They are a kitchen miracle.)

Place cooked cauliflower in the food processor with a couple tablespoons butter and a splash of milk. Add a little bit of salt. Turn it on and wait until it looks like mashed potatoes. Add more butter and milk if you’d like after you taste it. Yes, taste it. If it tastes fine, eat it.

Diverging Food/Memory

The stories on here often appear first in an Iowa newspaper. It's supposed to be a food column. And sometimes it is.

This column isn’t about cooking. Or eating. If it’s anything it’s stories that include food. There are recipes (sometimes) because the editor demands it. But mostly this is a few hundred words with food as one of the characters. 

I can’t say food has always been an important part of my life. For the longest time it was an afterthought. There were no nights around the dinner table as a child. Maybe a few special recipes before the grandmothers died. A holiday here or there. Depression. Disinterest. There were a lot of reasons I found a good meal was peanut butter on saltines and an adequate meal was peanut butter on a spoon.

As soon as I were old enough I got a restaurant job. 

Food became french fries and burgers. A steak if the chef happened to like you. But I didn’t learn to cook a meal until I was much older, married and raising children, and even then my techniques consisted primarily of boiling water or opening a box.

That all sounds woeful, but my point is this: If you grow up without enough food on the table you look at eating differently. Meals become important enough to plan and wasting one is a pity because there have been so many wasted chances already. The same goes for taste. There is a difference between those tinned tomatoes and ones you picked up at the farmers market. Why waste the energy on something that tastes like nothing?

If a co-worker brings in extra zucchinis — a regular occurrence as we wait for the first frost — I’m more than happy to take them because sometime soon real food, food that tastes like food, will be difficult to find. It’ll take some time and effort to bake a gluten-free zucchini bread or shred it up for fritters. 

Zucchini Fritters.

Peel and shred the zucchinis according to your tolerance for vegetables. Put the shredded zucchini in a colander, squeeze to take out as much moisture as you can. Place in a bowl and add 1/4 cup flour and a couple of eggs, salt and pepper. (Sometimes I’ll chop up an onion and drop that in too.)Try to form a patty. If it holds together nice, kind of on the damp side, you’re good. If not, add a little milk or a little more flour. 

All this time there’s been a cast iron skillet with olive oil or something on the stove on a medium-high heat. The oven is also on. Drop a couple patties in the oil. If you didn’t get enough moisture out, it’ll splatter, but no worries. Just step back. Brown one side, then the other. Put it on a cookie sheet in the oven and keep it warm while you finish the batch.

The Tyranny of Perfect Fruit

           

 Everyone knows one of these people. Ask them to bring something for a potluck and they'll arrive with a 7-tiered Venetian fantasy. It looks amazing. Like something on a Pinterest wedding board. And it tastes like decayed plaster.

Food doesn't have to be pretty to taste good. Presentation helps, but it's that judging a book by its cover thing all over again. The outside doesn't accurately reflect the inside. I was thinking about this little lesson in morals while I was looking at the bushel of pears I'd acquired.

My friend, Lillian, has an abundant pear tree. Every year, she gathers the fruit and gives it away in exchange for a donation to a charity. So every year, for as long as I've known Lillian, I end up with a lot of pears.

Pears are one of those fruits that I am loath to use. Their odd shape makes them difficult to peel. Not like an apple, round and nearly symmetrical. Pears take a little knife skill. They are needy. So they sat in the refrigerator, picked off one by one for snacking.

And after a week there were still a lot. Too many. Time to bake. So when a friend asked me to throw in a dessert for an impromptu dinner, I thought "Pear tart!" like it was an epiphany.

Anyone who has cooked a pear tart - or seen one in a cookbook - knows that the fruit is supposed to be sliced into identical wedges and lay in a pinwheel on the crust. It is a daunting task with more effort spent on creating the picture than the food. I don't do that. (And that should surprise no one.)

Ugly Pear Tart 

FILLING

6 smallish pears, peeled, cored and chopped into pieces (enough for about 3 cups)

Lemon juice

1 t cornstarch

(Some people like a spice, like cinnamon or nutmeg)

CRUST:

3/4-cup flour, plus extra

1/4-cup sugar

4 Tbs cold butter

Ice water

After chopping up the pears, toss them in a bowl with a little lemon juice so they don't get brown and some cornstarch so they don't get watery. Then make the crust just like any other piecrust. I use a food processor and then put the dough in the fridge for a half hour before pressing into a tart pan. Or a pie plate if I can't find the tart pan. Bake the crust, which looks like a large sugar cookie, at 425 for 15 minutes or until golden.

Drain the extra liquid from the pears. When the crust is done, reduce the oven to 350, dump the pears on top of the crust and bake for 40 minutes.

If I'm feeling fancy I'll drizzle some melted chocolate across the top. That happens seldom.

A history of Labor Day in 3, maybe 4, beers

Nick at the tavern.

The last Hooligans Picnic was probably 40 years ago. The guys that hung out at my grandparent's Southside tavern — that's the south side of Chicago, Roseland to be exact — would reserve some tables in a forest preserve, rent a few kiddie carnival rides to keep us occupied and throw some charcoal in a 55-gallon drum that had been sliced in half and sandblasted at the corner auto body repair shop. It was Labor Day and the neighborhood celebrated it vehemently. St. Patrick's Day was for rookies.
    A few kegs of PBR or Schlitz were rolled in, the neighborhood beer, back before they were ironic or cool. The ladies circled their aluminum chairs near the kegs because that was the best shade. They refused the beer and drank highballs out of plastic cups.
    I remember the drinks. Remember sneaking a sip when no one was looking. And I remember making 7 and 7s for the aunties (Seagrams 7 and 7-Up, but not too much 7-Up. They were very specific in their instructions.)
   But I don't remember the food. Hot dogs, I'd guess. It was Chicago, after all.
    The Hooligans broke up, moved away, drank themselves to death. It's what you'd expect from a group created on a bar stool. I moved too. To Carbondale — Southern Illinois University — where the Labor Day picnics were on rotting old porches and the beer wasn't much better. But the entire bottle was now mine. I didn't have to sneak sips.
    A grill was always going. There were hot dogs. And hamburgers. Standard grill fare, far better than standard cafeteria fare. Some ambitious girl would show up with a salad of shredded iceberg lettuce and grated carrots, not realizing there was nothing to eat it with. We were moving up in the world.
    Years later, the calendar pages flying past as if blown by a tornado, I flip through a pile of cookbooks, looking for a great Labor Day meal. I already chosen the beer. A home brew quietly aging in the basement. But the meal? It has to have zucchini in it. And tomatoes. Because that's what I picked up at the farmers market. I've found several complicated recipes, a dozen ingredients that look beautiful in the after pictures. But so much work.
    Last week, a friend, Nathalie Girod, posted a picture of her lunch on Facebook. Just slices of the freshest vegetables, lightly grilled. I didn't ask her for the recipe, because she won't have one. She never does. Great cooks don't work that way. So I made one up.

Grilled Zucchini

Cut  zucchini lengthwise into 1/4 inch slices.. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt and pepper and put it directly on a medium hot grill until the grill makes marks on it. That'll be about 6 minutes. Flip it over and repeat on the other side. I'll sprinkle some parmesan on top sometime. Maybe.