Farm Update
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| For the last month or so, we've had our transplants growing in flats in the greenhouse (above), but we've recently planted about half of them in the field and coldframes! |
How to Have Fun Eating More Vegetables
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| The coldframes are planted and producing veggies! These Easter Egg radishes will soon be ready! |
Last month when I put out the call for input from all you
folks, you responded with several great health questions for future
newsletters! The first topic in my
series on how to make healthy living fun is very near and dear to my
heart: How to incorporate more veggies
into your meals in a fun way!
It is a truth universally acknowledged that small children
don’t like vegetables. I know I didn’t
like them when I was a kid, and it’s through a strange twist of fate that I now
earn my livelihood from them. Now that I
am an adult and I pretty much love all vegetables, I realize that what I didn’t
love was the sad grayish veggies from cans that sometimes accompanied the main
stuff on my plate, and which went mostly ignored during meals.
If you grew up in the Midwest, chances are pretty good that
dinner revolved around some large piece of meat, with maybe some sort of
potatoes, and maybe some green beans or salad as an afterthought. While this type of meal still spells comfort
for many people, we could all benefit from more fruits and veggies in our
lives. The difficulty comes when you’ve
been cooking in the traditional meat-and-potatoes way for decades. Training yourself to cook in a new way can be
difficult, and if you add in the fact that some people associate veggies with
deprivation, changing your food habits might sound like an uphill climb you’d
rather just opt out of altogether. But
never fear! Here are some practical,
easy, and flavorful ways to incorporate more vegetables into your diet, and more joy into your meals.
About 12 years ago when I was on study abroad in France,
there was a big public service campaign urging people that half of the food on
their plates should be fruits and vegetables, which is a great rule of
thumb. That summer was the first time I
really had a sense for how that could be done deliciously. Each meal was treated like a celebration, and
the fresh fruits and vegetables I ate there were a far cry from the sad canned
and frozen stuff I had grown up with.
Indeed, borrowing from other food cultures is a great way to eat more
fresh veggies! I am huge on stir-fries,
which are common in Asian cuisines.
Basically, you can throw in whatever vegetables, meats, and herbs you
have on hand, add a sauce if desired, and serve over rice. Plus, eating with chopsticks makes it more
fun! Or in high summer, you can do it up
Italian-style by slicing some tomatoes, sprinkling them with a little salt and
olive oil, and putting fresh basil on top.
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| Phal transplants lettuce that was started as seeds in the greenhouse to the coldframe. |
There are plenty of things that people often make without
vegetables that gain a lot more flavor and interest from some veggies thrown
in. For instance, if you’re making
spaghetti, it takes about ten extra minutes to sauté whatever greens, tomatoes,
summer squash, bell peppers, onions, garlic, and herbs you have on hand, and it
adds so much to a plain sauce. Or if you’re
making scrambled eggs for breakfast, you can add any of those aforementioned
veggies and a sprinkling of cheese, and you have such a more festive way to
start the day. Omelets and soups are
another great way to use whatever veggies you happen to have at the moment. I made a soup the other day with leftover
chicken, potatoes, spinach, shallots, and garlic because that’s what I had
around, but you could just as easily add all sorts of other veggies for a
richer, more flavorful soup. There is no
need to stick to a recipe exactly. Just
get a basic concept and toss in whatever else fits the flavor profile of what
you’re making.
It’s no secret that the more flavorful and interesting a
meal is, the more satisfaction our brains derive from it. In fact, it takes a lot more of a boring food
to satisfy us than a very flavorful food, because we’re essentially trying to
derive the satisfaction from quantity rather than quality, and that can cause
us to eat quite a lot more than we actually need. So making your meals as flavorful as possible
will go a long way to making the meal experience more enjoyable, as well as
causing us to naturally eat a quantity of food that is more in line with what
we actually need. So how do we do
this? Well, a great place to start is
with fresh, high-quality ingredients.
The better your ingredients are, the more delicious the meal will
be. It’s really easy to make something
great out of stellar ingredients, even without a lot of time or fancy
preparation techniques, and it’s pretty difficult to make a lackluster dish out
of really flavorful ingredients. (Which
brings me to another point: please,
please, please don’t boil your vegetables!
Unless you’re making soup or mashed potatoes, there is no quicker way to
kill great flavor and texture than boiling veggies. So don’t do it.) Another great way to add flavor is with herbs
and spices. I’m relatively new to this
myself, and I have been guilty of many a lackluster meal because I just didn’t
think about adding some spices. But
simply by tasting what I’m cooking and adding a little oregano or cumin or
cinnamon or cayenne pepper, suddenly my meals are a whole lot better than they
used to be.
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| Phal plants potatoes in the field on our transplanter, which is pulled at a slow speed by the tractor. The machine pokes holes in the black plastic and waters each hole, and Phal places the potatoes. |
Another way to make meals more fun and more satisfying is
not actually related to the food at all.
It’s something we don’t often think about, but the atmosphere has a
large effect on our enjoyment of a meal.
Fred and I love to eat out, and it’s not just because the places we like
to go make great food. A lot of it is
about the atmosphere of the restaurant, whether it’s a quirky hole-in-the-wall
or a candles-and-white-linen kind of place.
The same food eaten in a great atmosphere feels more celebratory, so a
really easy way to make eating at home more of a joy is by creating a pleasing
atmosphere. Wipe the lunch crumbs off
your tablecloth, light some candles, and break out the good dishes. Somehow this simple act elevates the whole
meal to an experience to savor, no matter what you’re eating.
So here are some simple ways not only to incorporate more
fruits and vegetables into your meals, but to make meals in general more of a
joy. Eating right is an elemental part
of a healthy lifestyle, and if the point is to make healthy living more fun, then
certainly making healthy meals more delicious and more joyful is a huge step in
the right direction. This can go a long
way to making us not only healthier, but happier as well.
