“It’s Just That I HATE Vegetables”

I once asked a vegetarian friend why she avoided meat.

“Oh, I have nothing against meat,” she said, then squinted a little. “It’s just that I HATE vegetables.”

But seriously: why do so many people dislike vegetables? I think the widespread distaste for vegetables is more or less a rational decision, since so few people know how to prepare them in any way save boiling or steaming, and the results are often fairly disgusting. When I was a kid, pretty much all our veggies came from a can. It was my job to pick which can to open (I usually went for canned corn, which I still kinda like, though frozen has pretty much replaced it). On the rare occasions we did have fresh vegetables, they might get a pat of margarine and a dusting of some iodized table salt and pepper that had been ground literally years before. Blech!

Kids are notorious for not liking fresh veggies, but I know quite a few adults, too, who look at the forlorn broccoli floret on their plate as the price they have to pay for their meat entree.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Ninety percent of eating a delicious, vegetable-heavy diet is shopping. Start with great vegetables, and it’s VERY difficult to screw them up. Conversely, it’s very hard to make crappy industrial vegetables taste great, no matter what you do to them.

I’ve had my vegetable world turned upside down recently by the fine folks at Mariquita Farm out of Watsonville. Julia Wiley and Andy Griffin have long been sought out at farmers’ markets around the Bay Area (though they no longer do any at all), and the list of Bay Area restaurants that buy their spectacular produce is a who’s who of the very best. Their CSA is filled to capacity/booked solid, so no hope of getting on that, but they do offer the intriguing “Mysterious Thursday,” when Julia drives up to SF and unloads, for $25, what has to be the best-looking box of vegetables to be found anywhere.

The photo above is a portion of the box I got last week. I’ve never had, let alone cooked, agretti before, but man is it good. I made a terrific breakaway mapo dofu out of it by sauteing onions, ground beef and Chinese plum sauce, then adding harissa, half cake of soft tofu, and four or five cups of chopped agretti. The agretti made the dish sing by providing green tangy notes and a most pleasing popping texture.

Also in the box were lamb’s quarter’s (a delightful green), baby purple artichokes, dino kale, asparagus, baby turnips, tons of leeks, deliciously sweet salad greens, fancy carrots, favas, herbs, and plenty else. We managed to eat the entire box in four days!

But the point is: with vegetables this good, you WANT to eat them. You can’t help it. So that, it seems, is the trick — to find a supply of incredibly inspiring produce. Farmers’ markets are a great place to look, but I’m liking the box from Mariquita very, very much. If any of you have a favorite CSA, let’s hear about it!