Vegetables are a Side Dish

In 1957, Canada proclaimed the second Monday of October to be a day of Thanksgiving for the year’s bountiful harvest. The tradition of a thanksgiving feast dates back thousands of years among Canada’s Frist Nations, and history records that there were feasts to give thanks in the early French settlements, beginning in 1604. Thanksgiving in Canada has followed European and American traditions, most notably making turkey the key culinary feature in many homes.  The holiday occurs on October 10 this year when families will gather, feasts will be prepared and consumed. My blog this week is written with deep gratitude for the food on our table and for our many blessings of employment, a home, friends and family, and in the knowledge that so many people are not blessed with our bounty.

Nevertheless….as I peel Brussels sprouts….

Vegetables and I have a tenuous relationship. In this age of enlightened eating, obesity awareness and Saturday morning farm markets, I remain on shaky ground with produce.

You know all those magazine articles and diet tips you read about reducing calories by snacking on carrot sticks or celery stalks? That holds no appeal for me whatsoever.  Unless we’re talking about adding ranch dressing, a carrot stick is last on the list of my preferred snack foods. We once witnessed with horror the dietary habits of a woman who worked with Ken some years ago.  She snacked on baby carrots all day long.  She became a one-bag-a-day addict! Her skin turned orange right before our eyes!  The revulsion of it is indelibly etched on my mind.

As a kid, I struggled to choke down the vegetables my mother put in front of me.

Growing up in Winnipeg, out there on the wintery Canadian Prairie in the 1950s and 60s, the vegetables added to dinner plates at our house came in cans. They consisted of greyish peas, corn in gunky cream sauce, wax beans that may have actually been wax, beets (oh, the humanity!) and if we were being punished for some reason, lima beans.  Except for Thanksgiving, Easter or Christmas when a cauliflower would put in an appearance or perhaps some hateful Brussels sprouts, the only “fresh” vegetables came from the tuber family: carrots, turnips, and potatoes. The latter were mashed.  Every night.  Not being allowed to leave the table until I had cleaned my plate, I would push cold corn and potatoes around to make patterns and roads, imagining that the corn fairy would magically appear to get me out of there, or at least bring dessert.

Summer was a different story. My parents would drive out into the country to seek out farmers’ roadside stalls. We would then feast with glee on juicy sweet green peas, crisp carrots, radishes, green onions, snappy snap beans, and golden sweet corn cobs.  During asparagus season we’d eat the pungent stringy stalks for days on end; on toast with cream sauce for lunch, napped in butter for dinner.  In this act of true appreciation for the short harvest season, mother fed us such quantities of fresh produce that we’d all come down with what my parents euphemistically called “summer complaint.”

Truly, it was meat and bread that got me through my childhood. I feel quite attached to them.

Broccoli, peppers, avocados, and other exotic fare arrived on the scene when I was around 17. Things looked up from there. Now, as a grown up with a fairly sophisticated palate, I do love a lot of veggies, but I can barely make it through a salad at lunch without thinking that it might have been really good if it had had a yummy protein – like breaded chicken fingers, or thin slices of steak, or that dietary bad boy, bacon!

This makes a weight loss program like Weight Watchers a bit tricky.  Vegetables and fruits are, for the most part, assigned zero points. This means that you can eat all you want and it will have no effect on your daily points allowance. Adding the proteins and starches I love puts me well along the way to using up my total of 29 points before lunch is over.

Now, I’m not trying to make a case against eating veggies.  I recognize their healthful benefits.  I totally respect the vegetarian ethic.  I even like a good number of them – vegetables, that is, (vegetarians are o.k. too.) They’re wonderful – in their proper place – on the plate playing second banana, (pardon the fruit pun) to the main event: fish, meat or poultry. 

And while we’re at it, let’s acknowledge that veggies are way better if they are “dressed” in something from the other food groups – mostly dairy.  Spinach is a lot tastier folded into Boursin cream cheese with a touch of garlic and parmesan.  Sweet potatoes are to die for when pureed with honey, cream and sage.  Cauliflower is heaven in a bowl as a soup made with Stilton cheese. Broccoli is really only tolerable with a cheddar sauce. Or, as a friend in Buffalo says, “Veggies are really just an excuse for butter.”

So, maybe I’ve never really become a grown-up who eats her vegetable without complaint.  Still waiting for the corn fairy, I guess.