# 290: V is for Vegetable

It took me a while to become a fan but oh what I fan I am now plus recipe for Winter Vegetable Shepherd's Pie

Jan 07, 2025

∙ Paid

I’m the last one sitting at our dining room table and I can’t get up and leave until I’ve cleaned my plate…ALL of it. I’ve eaten tiny pieces of cooked ground round, white rice which is probably Uncle John’s or MJB, and what is left is a bloppy plop of mushy broccoli that is so overcooked it has turned grey, tastes and smells like death and is cold. I refuse to put one more bite of it in my mouth. I can hear my mom and dad in the kitchen doing the dishes. The morbid pile is starring me in the face. It’s so yucky—the taste, the smell, the color. Spinach and zucchini look the same and are served with the addition of Lawry’s seasoning salt which sort of helps me to at least try to take a few more bites.

I become a pro at moving mush around my plate but my mom knows I haven’t eaten any of it at all. I feel sick just looking at green gray yuck but I’m not supposed to leave the table until it’s all gone.

Beets, iceberg lettuce, stringy celery, crunchy carrots—they put me off, too. In order to get some vegetables in to me, she pours me a glass of V-8 juice and puts seasoning salt on top. Maybe I should tell her I’m on a vegetable-free diet.

silver fork and knife on plate — Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

And going out to eat? On the rare evening we go out, I have a tiny bowl of salad with oil & vinegar and croutons (I eat the croutons and leave the greens), spaghetti with red sauce, and Neapolitan ice cream. I leave the strawberry because it tastes weird to me. Yah, back then I have a fruit aversion, too. But, when my mom sees that I like the blue cheese dressing at The Chart House she takes me there just so I will eat the lettuce I thoroughly drench in white dressing.

When I begin learning to cook, my dislike of veggies begins to abate. It’s now me in charge of what goes in to the pot, how long it cooks and how it is seasoned. In my mid-teens, an organic food market opens in my town and I buy locally grown veggies. Big green heads of fresh broccoli are the backbone of countless stir-fries made in the Atlas spun steel wok I buy in the early 70s at Cost Plus in Jack London Square. I still have it! In my first small vegetable garden I plant seeds which sprout a lifelong love of growing for my kitchen. The more I take control from whence my food comes and how it is grown and cooked, the better it tastes to me and vegetables often star in the meals I make.

Today, I receive five pounds of winter squash grown by a friend. Tomorrow it will become soup. Later this week, the baked flesh of potatoes will be scraped out, mixed with butter and yogurt, mashed, stuffed with broccoli and mushrooms, and topped with cheese before heading back to the oven for a second bake. I could eat these every day and sometimes I do! A satisfying Winter Vegetable Shepherds Pie (recipe below) can last me for days as does soup slow cooked in my Dutch oven. Kale from my garden gets sweeter with the cold weather and I sauté it with eggs and homegrown garlic in the morning. My garden veggies don’t supply everything I eat, but they make a moderate dent.

So you may be wondering how I finally clean my plate so I can leave the table. When my mom leaves the table, I stuff the glop into my white Lollipop underpants, run to the bathroom and flush away the glop. I get away with this only once as she sees evidence in the laundry of what I have done to leave the table.

Inspiration strikes another day when she walks away from the table now cleared of every dish but mine. As quietly as I can, I wiggle out of my chair, get my feet on the ground. The plate is at about eye level and I reach my hands up to it and scoop off as much of the glop as I can. Then I lift a corner of the carpet as far back as I can and spread glop on the floorboards. I lay the carpet back down over it all. I’ve cleaned my plate!

Years later, when we are moving from that house, my mom and grandmom can’t figure out what might have been underneath the carpet when they roll it up…but I know. 😉

Happy New Year to All!

What I’m Reading

Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home by Jessica Fechtor

A well-written and compelling true story of how food and cooking helped Jessica’s recovery after a burst brain aneurysm and the surgeries that followed. Amazing!