Since Melissa had hooked me on sugar snap peas by saying if I could eat sugar snap I could eat snow and then I hated sugar snap, I was becoming especially fearful that I would despise snow peas, even in spite of their jolly name. Continue reading “battle 24–mystery peas–day 2”
battle 24–mystery peas–day 1
So way back in the first week of January when I decided we could mix things up and do any of January’s vegetables at any time during January, what was really happening was I was conveniently getting myself out of having to eat peas right away. I hate peas. Continue reading “battle 24–mystery peas–day 1”
battle 20–day 3–artichokes/part 2
My mom used to say when we were kids that on any given day she could usually count on one of us being bad and one of us being good. Rare were the days that my sister and I were both bad at the same time (and probably more rare were the days we were both good), but when the cosmos decided to gang up on my mom and those bad days came to pass, we could usually count on her coping by taking deep breaths and threatening us within an inch of our lives. Continue reading “battle 20–day 3–artichokes/part 2”
battle 20–day 3–artichokes/part 1
Before we talk about the possible cataclysmic demise of this whole project over one really dumb vegetable, let’s spend some time cherishing one of my biggest wins and appreciating the ingenuity of one of my most awesome supporters. My third and final hit on my plea for y’all to spring me from my January blues came from Future New York Times Best Seller of the World’s Most Ridiculously Amazing Cookbooks Sarah F., who has been sending love and advice from afar since the project began and who really saved the day on artichokes. Continue reading “battle 20–day 3–artichokes/part 1”
winning matters
I think I’m going to stop apologizing for being such an effing slacker. It’s minus 27 degrees outside right now (translation: 34 degrees) and that should be reason enough to never have to do anything ever. Once the weather warms up and I come out of hibernation we’ll kick this back into high gear, but while we’re experiencing frigid, Arctic temperatures here (translation: it’s sort of cool, we haven’t had any snow, and Sunday was even kind of balmy) I think we should just all count on JVV being kind of unreliable.
Now that we’ve all lowered our expectations we can get back to the business of winning shit. Is my perpetual winningness annoying? I didn’t think so either (obviously) but we were at a friend’s house last night for Family Fun Night with games, and of course I was winning, when David said to me, “You know, you don’t make this very enjoyable for the rest of us.”
Really? You mean losing blows? Ferfucksake, I know that, that’s why I win shit. But in the spirit of not always being a self-righteous asshole (who wins everything, always…always), I will concede this much: I have been stumped recently by an ugly, ugly, hateful green vegetable and I may or may not have to admit defeat for the first time. Maybe. No promises.
battle 23–day 2–cabbage
I was feeling a little more optimistic about January when I didn’t keel over after cabbage stew, so I decided to briefly set aside my unnecessarily ambitious plan to conquer the whole month in one week and dedicate the next few days to cabbage. Plain ole cabbage.
I fear and have avoided eating cabbage for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it’s a vegetable. For another, it has a stupid, jarring name. I am not a fan. And also, I definitely discriminate against it for being grown in a patch with orphan babies. That just doesn’t seem right. So it’s taken me a while to overcome these ingrained biases and get to the point where I understand that cabbage is just another leafy green, like arugula, or something else lovely I already love. I can love cabbage, too, I can love cabbage, too, I can love cabbage, too.
When I was complaining about cabbage to JVV’s friends on facebook (I don’t know why y’all are still my friends, I am so cranky), lots of folks offered up some really great ideas, but most of them involved cooking it in ways that would make the cabbage too closely resemble my nemesis, the onion. To me, cooked cabbage looks like onion’s red-headed stepsister, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t woman enough to take her on. Then I remembered rhu-Barb saying somewhere, sometime, something like, “You could always just add shredded cabbage to shrimp tacos.” Mmmm. Tacos. Voila. Thank you, rhu-Barb.
To make shrimp tacos, I took a little bit of my awesomeness, added a tad of my greatness, mixed it together with my brilliance and topped it with cabbage. Twenty-some odd weeks ago if I’d tried to make this meal, I would have had to track down and compare 15 different recipes, consult with the Google on everything from the origins of cabbage to the history of the taco, and spend countless hours wandering grocery aisles looking for the abundance of ingredients I still hadn’t decided on for gourmet tacos that would probably still be a bust.
But now I’m a pro, so here’s what I did instead. I combined the top notch culinary skills we’ve all taught me throughout the course of this project with some very important life skills I’ve spent years honing, i.e., a little bit-o-kitchen know-how plus a lot of laziness equals one fantastic taco.
After Terrible Vegetable Smorgasbord Sunday, Melissa sent me home with the leftover cabbage she’d picked up at Trader Joe’s while I was napping. Cabbage, check. Then I started pulling out some of my favorites, spectacular standbys like avocadoes, tomatoes and cheese, all items I always have in the house. Favorites, check. Then I got fancy, zeroing in on Elwood’s seriously good homemade hot sauce and ranch dressing to cool my mouth from Elwood’s seriously hot homemade hot sauce. Fanciness, check.
Now I just needed the shrimp. And I was so close to putting this whole meal together without wandering any aisles.
David and I have never been very smart about our freezer. We don’t know how to buy frozen food, we don’t know how to eat the frozen food we do buy, and we don’t know how to freeze food if it’s not already frozen. I don’t necessarily hold this against us because I’m happy to eat fresh food, but in the case of fish, frozen is probably the safest route for me, except for the part about not knowing how to buy frozen food. The one reliable frozen fish item David and I have purchased consistently over the years is breaded, popcorn shrimp, which is probably really processed pig parts in the shape of tiny shrimp, but we like it. And we always get the same kind: Kroger brand. So last week, pre-tacos, we were thinking about having shrimp and potatoes and David said he would pick up the shrimp on the way home, but when he got home he had in hand a different brand of frozen shrimp because he couldn’t find the kind we normally eat. It turns out we really liked the new brand, not least because the shrimp were definitely real and were supposedly caught near St. Simon’s Island, which is nearby (I dig local) and my family is from there, so I felt good about supporting folks from home. Mmm shrimp. But this week, shrimp taco week, when I asked David to pick up the same shrimp for shrimp tacos he could not remember where he got it. This was cause for minor panic at our house. For me. Before either of us embarked on an all-out shrimp hunt in the frozen aisles of all the grocery stores we frequent, I made him retrace his steps in his mind.
“Try to picture the aisle where you got the shrimp. Were there high ceilings (which could be Kroger on Edgewood or Publix on Glenwood) or lower-ish ceilings (Publix on Ponce)? Was it bright-ish (Publix) or darkish (Kroger)? Were you sort of near the front or the back of the store?”
Then I realized I was describing our grocery stores, in detail, to determine on which aisle he had been standing when he plucked the shrimp from its case, and I began to feel reasonably confident that I probably won’t ever get lost in my grocery stores again. I’m having kind of a big head about this right now.
We were able to conclude from this little exercise that he got the shrimp at the Publix on Ponce and the reason he got the new brand in the first place was because he was at Publix and we usually get Kroger brand, so it stands to reason he wouldn’t have been able to find our usual brand at Publix. I’m like a food sleuth. I amaze me. Big head getting bigger.
On taco night, I tossed the shrimp in the hot sauce, made a pico out of the tomatoes, avocado and cheese, then tossed that in the ranch dressing, put them all in fancy pants pretty little flour tortillas and topped those babies with some shredded cabbage. Holy best taco ever. Big head explodes.
battle 20, 22, 23–artichokes, parsnips, cabbage
The second friend to offer to hoist me out of the slump was my neighbor, Melissa R. It’s not unusual for Melissa to offer to cook for me under normal circumstances, but circumstances have changed in the last year and keeping me alive no longer tops her list of priorities. I suppose suggesting that I topped her list of priorities previously is a stretch, but now I’m really way down on the list. I’m like…third.
So here are the new circumstances: first, Melissa had a baby and the way that goes is he needs to be fed more often and my guess is more nutritiously than I do; and second, because my food preferences are changing, it’s not as easy to feed me as it used to be when her husband and I both refused all the same foods and she could make the same bland, colorless, tasteless meal for everyone.
But she perseveres.
So last week I was whining and complaining about all the terrible vegetables in January and how I really didn’t know if I could stomach them. Turnips. Bleck. Parsnips. Bleck. Even Melissa, who comes from farm people and will eat anything that grows out of the ground or off a tree or otherwise tastes like dirt, said the snips are good for nothing vegetables. But she was not about to let something as banal as cabbage get the best of me. (Cabbage, of course, is what I was the most afraid of. Gross. I hate the way it looks all slimy and translucent when it’s cooked. Like an onion. I seriously want to vomit right now just thinking of it.) We came up with this grand plan to knock out as many of January’s vegetables as possible the next day, then Melissa went grocery shopping and I took a nap.
Terrible Vegetable Smorgasbord Sunday included the following:
Trader Joe’s spinach artichoke dip—Heavenly. I ate so much of this I didn’t want to eat anything else, but in the spirit of TVSS, I eventually had to turn my attention to…
Mashed potatoes with parsnips—Less exciting, but not unmanageable. My beef with potatoes and parsnips is similar to kohlrabi trying to act like a potato, except this really is a potato…with parsnips. It was hard to evaluate the parsnips because of the awesomeness of the potatoes, except the potatoes were ever so slightly less awesome than usual, and obviously parsnips were the culprit. However, it didn’t make me want to cut my arm off or anything, so if faced with another mashed parsnip Christmas situation, I would probably be able to handle my shit.
Beef stew with cabbage (and no onions)—Surprisingly delicious (the cabbage, I mean…obviously Melissa’s stew was going to be good). I got text updates all day on the progress of the cabbage stew, which Melissa thinks she burned at the last minute, but since we’re a bunch of amateurs and we were preoccupied by rooting out slimy cabbage bits, we totally didn’t notice, and we ate it anyway, happily. Then we discovered, with lots of joy and exultation, that we like cabbage.
Terrible Vegetable Smorgasbord Sunday was like winter’s answer to summer’s fried food night. We accomplished a lot easily and deliciously with not a lot of effort. I still wasn’t done with artichokes (spinach artichoke dip seemed so good it felt like cheating, I needed to eat an artichoke) and I felt like I had one more cabbage demon to slay (cole slaw), but I went ahead and considered myself done with parsnips. Good enough.
battle 21–day 1–rhubarb
To help peel the project back off the ground, I pleaded with JVV’s facebook friends to give me exciting mix and match ideas, or—and this was what I was really going for—to cook any of these terrible vegetables for me in exciting ways. Emphasis on all the someone-else-doing-this-for-me parts.
I got some hits on that. I like this trend. A lot.
The first offer I received was from my new favorite friend, rhu-Barb. I’ve known Barb since she and BFF Lauren and I all worked together a number of years ago, but for some reason she didn’t catch the anti-veg itch when we started this back in the summer because she didn’t know I was me (penalty against Barb for this transgression). It was only in about mid-December, after Lauren—drunk with blog stardom from her third or fourth cameo—made everyone in her immediate vicinity read every post with her name in it that Barb put two and two together. So she went back to JVV’s auspicious beginnings and read about every fire, explosion and upended pizza until she knew about my vegetables better than I did. Then she e-mailed me:
Dear Julie,
You are the smartest, funniest, most hilariously awesome person I know, and I agree with you, you do have great hair, plus, vegetables are the single most terrible invention ever in the universe and I hate them, too, but I have managed to survive them, and I think you can, too, with this secret: cake. I would be obliged, honored even, to make a vegetable cake for you any time.
Your biggest fan,
Barb
I may have taken some liberties with that e-mail, but it definitely had the word cake in it. And she definitely offered to make it for me. And I definitely took her up on it.
Barb’s offer made my mouth water—rhubarb coffee cake and fresh-squeezed, homemade orange juice—and I was a little cranky with her for offering it during squash week when rhubarb week was still a month away. I wanted it to happen, like, that day. Then I realized, while I was being cranky in my head with my biggest fan for offering to make me a bunch of delicious homemade awesomeness, that my mouth was watering over a vegetable. A vegetable that had previously made me gag. Don’t I win something for that? Like a cookie?
Or cake.
Barb stuck to the rules and planned to bake rhubarb cake during rhubarb week. Then she, Lauren and I gathered in Lauren’s office before work one morning and rhu-Barb unveiled her vegetable cake.
Friends.
Few things in life make me happier than cake. It does things to me that make me blush. Until now, the rules have dictated that my vegetables must be prepared in the form of a dinner-type main or at least a substantial side, but since we’ve struggled to get moving again and we’re considering all kinds of new rules in this new year, let us fold into our arsenal of ways to win vegetables—fried, with meat, or covered in cheese—a new weapon: bake it in a cake.
Rhubarb. Won. And, we’re back.
rhu-Barb’s Amazing Vegetable Cake
- 1/2 cup butter or margarine
- 1 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 cup buttermilk (use the full-on fat kind, seriously)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 3 cups sliced rhubarb
- 2 1/2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
TOPPING:
- 3/4 cup light brown sugar
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
–Before you start: Preheat oven. Grease pan.
–In medium bowl mix butter, sugar, egg, buttermilk, and vanilla.
–Stir in rhubarb, flour, and soda.
–Pour into greased 13 x 9″ pan.
–Combine brown sugar, walnuts, and cinnamon; sprinkle over batter.
–Bake in 350 oven for 45 minutes or until inserted toothpick comes out clean (course, if your toothpick hits a piece of rhubarb, it will not come out clean…take another stab).
NOTE: Approximately 9-10 stalks rhubarb needed. If you cannot find them at the market, Publix has frozen rhubarb. Its usually somewhere near the ice cream and/or frozen juice. One bag will work, but sometimes I go crazy and use a bag & ½. If using the frozen kind, let it thaw a bit in the fridge for a day or so (you don’t want to use it frozen, but just barely thawed), then drain off the liquid and chop it up a little smaller (like each chunk into 3-4 pieces) because the way it comes is too big.
Note from Julie: I love Barb’s recipe. Very instructive. Very helpful.
battle 20–artichokes
This time I don’t have any good excuses. I’ve got nothing. Really. Nothing.
OK, I’ve got one thing. A girlfriend said to me yesterday that she’s in a “post-holiday can’t-get-all-my-balls-back-up-in-the-air funk,” which described precisely what’s happening with me right now. I’ve got a lot of balls. And since grocery shopping and cooking are still not automatic for me, it’s been a pain in the ass to work them back into my routine. Balls.
Obviously I didn’t intend to start the new year with such a lackluster performance. I actually jumped right into artichokes on artichoke Sunday when I was at the Midway Pub watching football. Midway serves artichokes fritters as an appetizer and I figured I could start the year off right with a big fried artichoke win. But they were boring. So boring they didn’t even warrant a full post. Super boring.
A few days later I gave artichokes another try with the artichoke cheese dip at Melton’s App and Tap (I frequent some fine eateries). Boring.
And there I was. New year. Shitty vegetable. Nothing to report (what was I going to say? I lost my first battle of the year? No way). So that was it, I came home day after day and didn’t cook, didn’t write, didn’t do shit.
Fortunately I have you friends to remind me so frequently what a slacker I am.
Finally I decided that since I let myself get so far behind that it would be fine to mix and match and combine and reorder and get crazy with January’s vegetables to catch up. New year. New rules.
Here’s what we’re up against in January (and honestly, why I’ve been reluctant to start the new year with typical New Year’s verve, I mean, come on, January): artichokes (those are technically left over from December, but I’m giving them one last chance), snow peas, rhubarb, rutabaga, cabbage and turnips.
Kill. Me. Now.
battle 19–day 2–butternut squash/christmas!
I took a few days off after my big onion-less soup victory (a few weeks’ distance from the soup experience has changed the narrative of its taste and smell and overall only moderate success from being boring to superb, in my mind) to get ready for Christmas. I had deliberately scheduled butternut squash for that week because it seemed like a pleasant winter vegetable and I would rather have something warm and friendly on my Christmas table than something disgusting that no one would eat, like turnips. My sister, Bethany, who has been angling for another blog cameo since her last appearance was less flattering than she cared for, signed on to make Christmas squash so I could concentrate on everything else. But unfortunately for Bethany, just because she cooks something yummy doesn’t mean her second appearance on the blog will be any more flattering than the first (even though she also has good hair, it kind of runs in the family).
In the days leading up to Christmas—which was at my house this year and was the first time since both my sister and I have been married that we would all be together on Christmas—I began to plan a menu and schedule what I should cook when so I could achieve the one thing I want to accomplish in this project: everything coming together at once. If I was able to do that on Christmas day it would be like my own little Christmas miracle.
I’d put together a pretty straightforward menu, but one that incorporated as many elements of the project as possible without straying too far from traditional Christmas goodness (I didn’t want my dad to go hungry, plus since he had so successfully scheduled Thanksgiving so that everything landed on the table all at once, hot and ready to eat, I would be relying on him pretty heavily to help me do that at my house, and I figured the least I could do as thanks was make a few things he wouldn’t mind eating).
Our Christmas menu for six (which was clearly enough to feed 112):
- Roast and gravy
- Orange maple glazed sweet potatoes (which I first made for pre-Thanksgiving)
- Brown sugar Brussels sprouts
- Epic butternut squash casserole (so named by Bethany)
- Mashed potatoes
- Mixed green salad
- Grandmother Judy’s butter muffins
- Pumpkin crisp (this delight has found a permanent home my repertoire; I love it)
I got the sweet potato and Brussels sprouts recipes from the Fresh Market Holiday Handbook I had been holding onto for months but only got around to looking at the Wednesday before Christmas. I knew the sweet potatoes would be easy and the sprouts looked even easier, and because I had just about convinced myself that cooking only easy things would be the best way to achieve synchrony, they both went on the list. Everything else was pretty standard: roast, red meat, obviously; David is a mashed potato expert and for me no holiday is complete without them, so that was an obvious inclusion; the salad was just because it seemed like the right thing to do; my grandmother’s butter muffins are a holiday staple; pumpkin crisp instead of pie for dessert because I love it and I don’t love pie; and finally, last but not least, the butternut squash casserole my sister promised would be epic.
I had talked to my sister about a dozen times earlier in the week and traded several text messages about plans and how much time she would need to make epic squash (many, many hours) and whether she would make it at my house or her house and whether there would be enough oven space and and and…. We also talked about how she and her husband should bring all their presents to our house so we could all open everything together and then have our big dinner and then all collapse on the couch in beautiful, stuffed misery and watch football. I said, hey, make sure to bring your dog so we can spend all day doing all the things we’ve always done on Christmas since time immemorial. It was around this plan and these conversations that I built my schedule, my hard-and-fast, dinner-at-3, because-that’s-what-time-we-always-have-dinner schedule.
So you can imagine my surprise when late, late, late on Christmas Eve I got a little text message from her that said, hey, we’ll be there around 2.
This was when If You Fuck Up My Christmas I’ll Kill You Dead Julie told It’s All Good in the Spirit of Christmas Julie to take a hike, and replied:
Me: No, no, no. Party starts at 11.
This was me being generous, still tending slightly toward Christmas spirit; I really wanted them there at 8 a.m.
Her: Sorry, lunch with husband’s family.
And this was when searing venom began to shoot out my eyes, ears, nose, fingers, toes, ala fire-breathing dragon lady, but worse, because it was me.
Me: I don’t like this at all.
So she called me. Her husband lost his mother to breast cancer a number of years ago, so it’s especially important to them to spend holidays together with his father and sister and celebrate in the spirit of holiday togetherness.
Me, on the phone: OK, let me sulk about this for a minute. I’ll be fine.
We hung up. I sulked. And then I relented. Begrudgingly.
Me, back to texting: OK, we can wait to do presents and dinner. We’ll just make it supper. Do NOT open ANY presents before you get here. At least let me have that.
Me again: And don’t be late or I’ll poke your eyes out and won’t give you a good blog cameo.
She said something nice and sincere here.
Me: I’m serious about poking your eyes out.
The next day they arrived early and her epic squash casserole was heat-and-eat ready. I’m not saying I’m a bully, but sometimes the fear of god, or eye gouging, goes a long way. I’m just sayin. What?
Christmas dinner was a fantastic success. My dad worked out the schedule, I chopped up my fancy vegetables with the fancy knives my parents gave me for Christmas (someone reads the blog!), and then I delegated the shit out of everything else, which actually felt great. Having more hands on deck made achieving my ultimate dinner goal much more manageable, and at 6:05, my entire Christmas dinner—including four new-to-me-in-2009 vegetables—was on the dining room table, hot and delicious looking. Happy Christmas to me. We did it.
And Bethany was right. Her butternut squash casserole was epic. Won.
Bethany’s Epic Butternut Squash Casserole
Cut two large butternut squashes in half, lengthwise. Get all the goo and seeds out of the middle. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place them face down on a cookie sheet and roast at 350 for 1 hour.
Let cool.
Scoop all the mushy goodness away from the skin. Combine with two eggs, salt and pepper, a mountain of shredded cheese (I used sharp cheddar), and lots of bread crumbs. Mash it up really good. Spread in an appropriate sized baking dish. Throw a few pats of butter around the top (I did about 8). Then bake at 350 for 40 minutes.
Remove from oven.
Crumble Cheez-its over the top to form a nice crust. Bake for 5 more minutes.
And another thing: This is my friend Sarah’s blog documenting her treatment and personal commentary on breast cancer issues. It’s funny, enlightening and includes some great not-your-typical breast cancer resources: http://www.thetitoffensive.blogspot.com/
Julie vs. Vegetables 