Veggie-challenged?
January 11th, 2008 by Y.G.“Eat your vegetables” is something a lot of people must have heard in their childhood. “Eat your vegetables” is also what Weight Watchers and many more diet programs tell you as well, because we all know it: there are few calories in most vegetables, so you can eat a lot, not feel deprived, curb your hunger and lose weight in the process.
Unless you’re veggie-challenged and like very few of them. (I don’t count corn and potatoes as vegetables, by the way.)
Truth be told, I used to hate vegetables with a passion. Well, maybe not hate them, but my take on them was, basically, “I don’t know that vegetable, so I don’t like it”. Or I would convince myself that this green in my plate tasted awful, and of course the power of self-conviction is strong… so strong that I indeed wouldn’t like what I was eating.
But things change, people change, tastes change as well. If you’re in such a case, here are a few tricks that worked for me, and have contributed to turning me into a veggie-lover:
- First of all, have an open mind! As I mentioned above, keeping on thinking that unknown veggie = bad-tasting veggie will make you believe that it is true. Try to look at what is in your plate with a more positive approach. It may or may not work, but after a while, I really found out that it was helping me a lot. (I now like spinach, for goodness’ sake. Spinach from the campus restaurant, no less. Not exactly gourmet food, huh.)
- Herbs! The power of varied herbs is very effective. They can help give more taste to something that you normally find very bland, and if, like me, you’ve been used for a long time to artificial flavours and sweeteners in processed foods, a vegetable can indeed taste ‘bland’ at first.
- Sneak some vegetables in other foods: broccoli in your pasta and meat, for instance. It will make you get a little taste of it while still being partly ‘covered’ by other foods you’re sure to like. (But having an open mind remains a key component here; let’s not think “I already know I won’t like this dish because there’s ____ inside”!)
- Try to toy with new recipes. Pick something that looks very appetizing in a magazine or on a website, for instance. Having a precise recipe to follow–with advice on how to cook the vegetables inside–will at least provide you with a way of not accidentally cooking something very bland. (I’m an experiment-lover, and it already happened that a vegetable I cooked tasted awful just because I didn’t know how to cook it properly.)
These are only but a few tips, and I’m sure there are many others that can be useful. But I hope these ones will already help.
