Tuesday, Day 35 - There are no vegetarians in my house, nosiree Rob. Cory will eat salad, as long as it is wearing his favorite Makoto Ginger Dressing. I adore salad, indigestible though it may be for me, especially if it is well-dressed in Ken's Steakhouse Thousand Island. Cory will ask for asparagus, and will eat pretty much any vegetable I put in front of him. But if I'm not doing the serving, he is just as likely to pile his plate high with one of every cooked protein in the house while forgetting about the gorgeous Italian broccoli or Greek green beans.
Rob can't be bothered with anything green. At a salad bar, while I am honing in on choice bits of romaine, mesclun, and baby spinach, he is making his plate look like something out of an surrealist's nightmare. Chick peas, marinated artichoke hearts, pickled beets, blue cheese dressing, all swirling around in nauseating technicolor. But even worse, he has little interest in any of my cooked vegetable dishes, especially if they are green. Or yellow or orange or white.
I admit to being rather sensitive on the subject. I may not be able (or willing) to make my own pie crust, but I am a whiz with vegetables. When I'm done with them, they taste good - really good - and it irritates me that my efforts go unrecognized by my regular eating audience. Now it could just be that I am in a pissy mood today - and I am, make no mistake about it - but it would do this Jewish mother's heart good to see my husband happily, deliberately, and voluntarily piling vegetables on his plate next to whichever protein and starch is about to be consumed.
Which is why it was so funny when both he and Cory ate the "wrong" part of the kraut sveckle. Now, kraut sveckle is not technically a vegetable dish. although it contains a rather healthy amount of cabbage. Shredded cabbage that has been slowly and lovingly cooked down in butter for an hour or more until it tastes rich and sweet and nothing at all like that boiled wedge you probably plunked down next to slices of corned beef on St. Patrick's Day. But first and foremost it is a noodle dish, and it is the contrast of the bland egg noodles and the cooked cabbage that work together so perfectly.
So I was working on this green bean dish from Guy Fieri, and decided to cook the cabbage for the kraut sveckle at the same time. When they were both done, I set them side by side on the counter. No noodles. As you may have guessed, my two geniuses ate rather generously of the cabbage, ignored the green bean dish, and felt virtuous for having consumed at least one vegetable with their dinner. I'm not so sure it was funny after all.
But that's not why I'm in a pissy mood today. No, I know why and there is little I can do about it but stew like a Shabbos cholent. Because I am fed up to the eyebrows with bureaucracy and red tape and forms and systems and intrusions and questions and requests and all that jazz to the point that I want to tell somebody, or several somebodies, off. And I know it wouldn't help, and I would end up feeling bad about being mean, and let's face it, it's a hot mess, and if I open my mouth and go all New York stevedore on them, I will just make things worse. Especially since I suspect I am overreacting in the midst of an anxiety attack. Hot mess, I told you.
Even my pedicure did not cheer me up the way it usually does.
I followed Guy's recipe almost exactly, making half of it (I only had one ear of corn and two cups of green beans in the fridge) and using a sweet rather than a red onion. Be generous with the salt, and feel free to blanch the green beans for an extra minute. I grated my own Parm, and I'm pretty sure there was more than three tablespoons, even with half the recipe. This made a very nice dish, tasty as well as visually pleasing. I snuck it onto Rob's dinner plate last night, and he proclaimed it "very good." Coming from him, that is indeed high praise for a vegetable.
Tomorrow I have an appointment at 7:00 am for the breast MRI, which means we will have to leave here around 6:00, which means waking up around 5:00. Ha, if you thought I was cranky today, wait until tomorrow.
Which is why it was so funny when both he and Cory ate the "wrong" part of the kraut sveckle. Now, kraut sveckle is not technically a vegetable dish. although it contains a rather healthy amount of cabbage. Shredded cabbage that has been slowly and lovingly cooked down in butter for an hour or more until it tastes rich and sweet and nothing at all like that boiled wedge you probably plunked down next to slices of corned beef on St. Patrick's Day. But first and foremost it is a noodle dish, and it is the contrast of the bland egg noodles and the cooked cabbage that work together so perfectly.
So I was working on this green bean dish from Guy Fieri, and decided to cook the cabbage for the kraut sveckle at the same time. When they were both done, I set them side by side on the counter. No noodles. As you may have guessed, my two geniuses ate rather generously of the cabbage, ignored the green bean dish, and felt virtuous for having consumed at least one vegetable with their dinner. I'm not so sure it was funny after all.
But that's not why I'm in a pissy mood today. No, I know why and there is little I can do about it but stew like a Shabbos cholent. Because I am fed up to the eyebrows with bureaucracy and red tape and forms and systems and intrusions and questions and requests and all that jazz to the point that I want to tell somebody, or several somebodies, off. And I know it wouldn't help, and I would end up feeling bad about being mean, and let's face it, it's a hot mess, and if I open my mouth and go all New York stevedore on them, I will just make things worse. Especially since I suspect I am overreacting in the midst of an anxiety attack. Hot mess, I told you.
Even my pedicure did not cheer me up the way it usually does.
I followed Guy's recipe almost exactly, making half of it (I only had one ear of corn and two cups of green beans in the fridge) and using a sweet rather than a red onion. Be generous with the salt, and feel free to blanch the green beans for an extra minute. I grated my own Parm, and I'm pretty sure there was more than three tablespoons, even with half the recipe. This made a very nice dish, tasty as well as visually pleasing. I snuck it onto Rob's dinner plate last night, and he proclaimed it "very good." Coming from him, that is indeed high praise for a vegetable.
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