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MAVERICK59
Posts:
4,607
11/18/11 5:08 P
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MPLANE37
SparkPoints: (50,774)
Fitness Minutes: (21,841)
Posts:
2,100
11/17/11 2:20 A
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It is not that the veggies taste terrible, but rather it is difficult to cook them right, far more difficult than cooking meat. I personally wasted a lot of veggies trying to cook them following a recipe. So the problem, I suspect, is that you need to find out a way to cook them that makes the resulting food at least edible, if not flat out delicious. A good way is roasting them, as suggested, and putting a layer of melted low-fat cheese on top. You can also put in there some meat if you like. There are many more ways that you can cook vegetables, but all are more elaborate than just roasting.
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HOLISTICDETOXER
SparkPoints: (32,307)
Fitness Minutes: (20,400)
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2,704
11/17/11 12:54 A
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The first thing I would say is that you might just have to (temporarily) get over the idea that your veggies all need to taste wonderful. It's like putting fuel into a car... it doesn't matter whether or not the car likes the taste of the gasoline! You fill up the tank with the gas that makes your car run its best. Fill up your body with the food it needs to function properly.
I am a former veggie hater, and now a seven-year vegetarian. I was twenty when I ate my first salad. I didn't know cabbage from lettuce. I didn't know how to cut a tomato (yeah, yeah, it's fruit...). Basically, I was a few weeks from my twenty-first birthday and I looked at myself in the mirror and said, "You're being stupid. Start eating vegetables, you idiot." So I started eating vegetables. And they didn't really taste good. But I stuck with them, and would HUGE quantities of different vegetables every day. I remember salads of carrots, grated red cabbage and lamb's lettuce. Or roasted root vegetables on a bed of arugula. And eggplant planks rolled around bell pepper strips. I just kept eating vegetables- ALL sorts, prepared ALL ways. And after several months of eating 5-10 different fruits and veggies every day, and at least thirty to forty different varieties every month, my taste buds adapted. Now I can't get enough! You really do just need to up the variety and stick with it looooong term.
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DIANEGLORIA
Posts:
457
11/16/11 1:50 P
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Have to concur about the roasting of veggies. Always use a healthy fat, like the olive oil mentioned. Stay away from anything aritificial, the fake stuff, yuck.
The cool thing about roasting them, is it brings out the natural sugars in the veggies, they will caramelize which deepens their flavours. With Thanksgiving coming up, roasted veggies has always been a family tradition. My mother always just put in several bags of brussel sprouts into the turkey drippings, in the last hour of cooking. Potatoes, too.
When I went to a very fancy Thanksgiving one year, when I was a travel nurse... the daughter was a professional caterer, and she roasted all sorts of root veggies, got that same wonderful flavour I was used to at home. Might be a cultural thing, being we are the same ethnic background. But such wonderful vibrant flavours. She used olive oil, oddly enough, did not do them in the pan drippings, which she only used for the gravy after pulling the bird out, while it rested... gravy was made.
Back to veggies, raw is lovely. And I enjoy steaming. They now sell the steaming bags on the plastic bag isle, great cooking technique, easy clean up. Another healthy thing some folks spritz on is Braggs Liquid Aminos - All Purpose Seasoning, a gourmet alternative to soy sauce and tamari sauce from a soy protein. It is gluten free and not fermented, contains no preservatives. Sort of has the flavour of soy sauce, but not near the sodium content.
0 calories!
As for salt, I really like to enjoy a good quality salt. REAL Salt which is mined from deep in caves in southern Utah, is very lovely. Those salt mines are from when there used to be an ocean here in the SW, many many years ago. Back then there was no polution, nothing to contaminate the salt. No contaminates, clean taste and you can use much less because it is so much more flavourful. Might as well have good salt, if you are gonna do salt at all. The salt of the earth... ever recall that old saying. Without salt we literally would die. But if you are doing processed foods at all, you have lots of extra salt in your diet. Me... I do not do processed foods, so I can pick the salt I want. And I am very choosey.
The pureed idea is a good one, people can hide pureed veggies in almost anything, even brownies! Jerry Steinfeld's wife wrote a whole book on the subject. She gets her finicky eaters to eat veggies and not even know they are eating em. Highly recommend her book, or might be able to find some of her stuff if you just google her. I have seen her interviewed several times, those might be on You Tube, as well. It is not as difficult as it sounds. She shows you how to do it, step by step. Preparation, thinking ahead. You can do it!
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