The Grown Diaries

The Belgian town of Ghent has declared that Thursdays are “Veggie Dag” — Veggie Day. Voluntarily, mind you.

In the Guardian — “Day of the lentil burghers: Ghent goes veggie to lose weight and save planet”

Ghent embarks on a radical experiment today, seeking to make every Thursday a day free of meat and of the fish and shellfish for which the city is renowned.

On the eve of what is being touted as an unprecedented exercise, the biggest queue in the Flemish university town of 200,000 yesterday was for signatures – to collect a bag of wholefood goodies and sign up for “Donderdag – Veggie Dag”, turning the burghers of Ghent into pioneers in the fight against obesity, global warming, cruelty to animals and against the myth that meat-free eating amounts to a diet of soggy lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a foul-tasting bean burger.

Try that in this country, and you’d have an armed insurrection on your hands.

I’m not certain what this broccoli is saying in what I’m pretty sure is Vietnamese, but he seems quite happy about it, whatever it is. :)

He would definitely taste better were he spicy and grilled. ;)

Being of Irish and German extraction, I am, as you might expect, enamored of the humble potato.*

The potato has never been an issue for me, no matter what variety or preparation. I have even been known to sneak a number of raw slivers whilst chopping a spud for some recipe or another.

It is thus with great pleasure that I point to today’s** poetry entry from the ongoing and endlessly entertaining Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, “Ode to the Potato” by Barbara Hamby:

"They eat a lot of French fries here," my mother
   announces after a week in Paris, and she's right,
not only about les pommes frites but the celestial tuber
   in all its forms: rotie, purée, not to mention
au gratin or boiled and oiled in la salade niçoise.[...]

Continue…

---

* The same cannot be said of cabbage in all its forms, oddly enough.

** And a Happy Pi Day, by the way!

There’s an article in the LA Times today talking about early North Americans being forced to change their diet to incorporate more plant life when the woolly mammoth and other megafauna began dying off. “When the woolly mammoth ran out, early man turned to roasted vegetables”:

Long before early humans in North America grew corn and beans, they were harvesting and cooking the bulbs of lilies, wild onions and other plants, roasting them for days over hot rocks, according to a Texas archaeologist.[...]

Meadowlands and forest edges were filled with lilies, wild onions and perhaps two dozen other wild plants ready for the harvesting. The bulbs of these plants are about as nutritious as sweet potatoes, but their energy is locked up in a dense, indigestible carbohydrate called inulin. The only way to make the bulbs digestible is to roast them for two days or longer.

Via Daily Dish

It sounds like a good idea — disguise vegetables in more “palatable” forms and get the best of both words. An article in the LA Times this past week discusses this tactic with parents sneaking vegetables into their children’s diets…and how it can backfire.

“Parents seek ways to make kids eat vegetables”

So an increasing number of parents are loading the foods their kids will eat with produce they think they should be getting. And food makers are lending a hand, offering a growing array of processed foods that sneak vegetables and fruits into chips, juice and nuggets.

But some nutritionists and public health experts wonder if parents these days are relying too much on the sneak attack. They doubt if kids will ever develop a taste for vegetables in all their leafy glory if they are hidden in smoothies and macaroni and cheese. Some say this well-intentioned sneaking could produce kids less likely — not more — to eat greens.

Seems like a balanced approach would be best, combining sneaky and normal vegetable eating. It’s what I have to do with myself, and I’m nearly 40. :) Giving myself a bit of credit, however, nowadays I actually enjoy trying new foods and overcoming my aversion to old ones. This is a motivation that was entirely absent in my youth.

For a year during my late teens, I went vegetarian, which, for someone who hated most fruit and vegetables, was quite an accomplishment. That I didn’t die of malnourishment is something of a miracle, but I can probably thank Italian food for that, specifically cheese pizza (not to mention pasta and garlic bread, but that’s another post).

What “cheese pizza” means, of course, is in the eye (and nose and palate) of the beholder, but for at least one variety, the government is stepping in to define and protect it. And as with any sweeping declarations about something seemingly unimportant, it has caused controversy. See the article at the BBC News, “Protection for pizza sparks row in Naples”.

Legend has it that in 1889, in the restaurant The Brandi, the Queen of Savoy was served a pizza made specially for her in the colours of the national flag; a red tomato base, a white mozzarella topping and to finish, a sprig of green basil.

A simple ingenious combination of tastes, which was named after the Queen - Margherita.

Today the Margherita is sold in every corner of the globe but so often it looks and tastes like a plastic impersonation.

The pictures accompanying this post are from my first attempts with our new pizza stone back in January, and was a pizza margherita, alla Trader Joe’s I guess you’d call it since the dough and buffalo mozz came from that store.

Wound up pretty tasty (though it could have used more time for the dough to firm up). It’s harder (though not impossible) to go wrong when you have good ingredients. The Neapolitans defending their pizza are all about proper ingredients and methods:

The new law states the pizza must be no more than 35cm (14in) in diameter and no thicker than a third of a centimetre at its centre, rising to 2cm at the crust.

The tomatoes must be the San Marzano variety grown in the fertile soil at Mount Vesuvius’ base.

The oil: extra virgin; the cheese: buffalo mozzarella. All the ingredients must be from the Campania region.

The oven must be wood-fired, and the pizza must cook in less than two minutes.

Naturally there are disagreements, with different camps championing their versions. I say we’re all winners when it comes to pizza competition.

It occurs to me that pizza was my gateway vegetable, spawning the ideas and efforts that eventually turned into the Grown Diaries.

I’d often thought over the years how curious it was that I loved tomato sauce, but couldn’t stand whole or diced tomatoes. The taste was the same, more or less; the texture was the issue for me.

I remember quite well the first moment I was eating a homemade “crispidilla” (a pizza-like concoction I make on the grill with tortillas, diced tomatoes, olive oil, herbs, and cheese — the Neapolitans would plotz) and concentrating on the diced tomatoes tasting the same as a sauce would have, chomping my way into epiphanic glee. Imagine that!

Of course, just about anything tastes better with a load of melted cheese, but it was a start. And now when I grill those crispidillas up, I wind up with a mere sprinkling of cheese and a ton of tomato.

So, whether you are officially certified to make Pizza Napolitana by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana, or are just making a few pies in your oven at home, you are simultaneously engaged in the sneaky business of making vegetables tasty. And that’s a good thing.