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Vegetables
General Rules for Vegetables
Your mom told you this. Vegetables are good for you. But they don’t have to taste bad. Well, maybe some of them do, if only to prove the fact that we’re all individuals, and we can’t all like everything.
Whether grown in your garden or purchased at the market, vegetables should always be washed thoroughly.
Soak them in cold water to crisp and freshen them before peeling. Depending on which recipe you’ll be preparing, consider not peeling them at all, as many of the nutrients are too often discarded with the peels.
Vegetables can be cooked by baking, steaming, or boiling in water and, for the most part, they should be cooked only until they are tender, as overcooking is one of the more common errors made in cooking vegetables.
Long and slow cooking without water, or in a small amount of water, preserves most of the nutrients, but it can destroy the color and flavor of green vegetables, and some of the white ones.
To preserve color in green vegetables, such as spinach, brussels sprouts, asparagus, and green beans, as well as the white vegetables, like onions, cauliflower, and cabbage, the general rule is to cook in the shortest possible time, and only until tender.
Drop vegetables gradually in a large amount of rapidly boiling, salted water, in an open kettle, and keep boiling throughout the cooking period. Drain, then add butter and seasoning. Reserve the liquid, boil down, and use for sauce, for soup, or to boil up any of the leftover vegetables.
Vinegar or other acids will turn bright green vegetables to a brownish color. Salting vegetables before or while cooking may harden the fibers, but it often improves the flavor. Add a teaspoon of salt to a quart of water when boiling, and sprinkle a half teaspoon over a pound of vegetables when steaming.
Winter vegetables should be kept in a dark, cold place and watched carefully, breaking off any sprouts that might appear.
To destroy the odor of cabbage and cauliflower while cooking, place a thick crust of wheat bread in the kettle, on top of the vegetable just when it begins to boil.
When vegetables are to be served up with a sauce, put them in a hot serving dish, and pour the sauce over them.
Some recipes will modify, or even ignore, these general rules.
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Categorization of the Vegetable Section
I gave some thought to just how I should categorize this section. As there were far too many vegetable recipes to fit on one page, the need for subpages was absolute. But if I were to put each vegetable in a subpage of its own, directly beneath this one, the submenu navigation would be larger than the page, and that would not be aesthetically pleasing.
I considered separating them by root or leaf vegetables, but then there would be the problem of what to do with the tomato, which is actually a fruit, so I wanted to avoid that one.
I thought of dividing them by color, as white vegetables, green vegetable, and perhaps other vegetables, and that might have worked.
In the end, I opted to borrow a version of the scheme used in “Hollyhocks & Radishes,” an excellent Upper Peninsula cookbook published in 1989, that divides its vegetable recipes by growing season, as such:
- Vegetables of Spring and the Early Garden
- wild leeks, morels, asparagus, spinach, peas, and greens
- Vegetables from Mid-Summers Garden
- carrots, broccoli, tomatoes, sweet onions
- Vegetables at the Peak of the Garden
- green beans, zucchini, crookneck squash
- Vegetables of Autumn’s Harvest
- corn, butter beans, beets, green tomatoes, winter squashes, red cabbage, turnips
- Potatoes, rice, and hominy are dealt with in separate sections.
Of course, there will be some overlapping, as many of the dishes we’ll be preparing will call for more than one vegetable and, with the availability of most any vegetable at any time of the year, we wouldn’t want to restrict ourselves to those that are in season.
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I recommend this book highly, it’s well worth the money.
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