I like bread. Cheese is delightful. Meat, fish, poultry – divine.

I hate vegetables. Really. I despise them.

Meh.

That said, not eating them is not an option. I could buy all kinds of supplements but that’s not financially practical. I could drink vegetable juices, but the sodium, even in the low sodium version has more salt than a salt lick.

There are ways to make them at least palatable. My personal favorite…

Get a bag of premium frozen vegetables. I prefer the Normandy mix (carrots, cauliflower and broccoli). The Asian variety has frozen mushrooms (meh.) which are OK when wok-ed but turn into slimy chunks of unpleasantness when the following method is applied, so if you are using the Asian variety, pick them out and save them for something else, like maybe a creamy mushroom soup. I’m sure I’ll cover that in a later post.

Find a bowl with a plate that will act as a lid. Pour in about 1/8 of a cup of Italian salad dressing. I know most folks likely have this in the refrigerator door. Stuff that has sat, and sat, and sat in the grocery store aisle before you bought it in fit of “health” and then it sat in the fridge door. I know that’s what I used to do. What I do now is grab a lemon from the fruit bowl, zest it with the microplane, then juice it into a bowl. You can use vinegar, lemonade, or even raspberry or lime juice, but it needs to be something high in acid. For lemons, squeeze against the palm to keep the seeds out of the bowl, but if you just had your cuticles done, forgo that and go get the reamer or the juicer. Lemon juice on raw fingers isn’t fun or pretty.  Find some good quality olive oil (virgin or extra virgin preferred), go into your spice rack and find Italian Seasoning, Greek Seasoning, or Herbes de Provence. You should likely have one of them. Go to the fridge and find some mustard. Whole grain is best because the mustard seeds look really cool and taste great in the dressing.  Now, into the bowl, shake in one of the seasonings, add a little salt. squirt in a dollop of the mustard. Find your whisk, and drizzle the olive oil in while whisking until the stuff in the bowl looks like that salad dressing in the bottle after you’ve shaken it. The mustard will act as an emulsifier that will keep your dressing from splitting into a grease slick floating on lemon juice if you’ve done it right.  Now put in enough frozen vegetables to satisfy 2 daily servings and microwave for about 2:20 to 2:35 depending on the power of your microwave.

The heat will cause the dressing to absorb into the cold vegetables as they steam. You can also do a version of this dressing with soy, Chinese Five Spice Powder, and sesame oil if you’d rather use the frozen stir fry mix. I’d pick out those mushrooms though. As I said before – ewww.

Be careful taking off that plate you used as a lid for the bowl, salt to taste.

I made some garlic mashers (previous post), bought 2 roasted chickens (I’ll tell you why I usually buy two later), and the tolerable vegetables.

Dig in. 🙂