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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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What vegetables are you having, exactly?

I agree with the other comment about the best and easiest way to make generic leafy greens tasting good being stir-frying them, with some shallots/scallions/ginger/garlic (not necessarily all of them at once) and salt, maybe some oyster sauce. The Cantonese would blanch it very briefly before stir-frying to preserve colour and improve texture, but it’s not necessary if you don’t want to wash another pot. Conversely, just blanching them works for a lot of Chinese vegetables as well, if the vegetables themselves are fresh enough. Try to pick smaller specimens of e.g. choi sum or bok choi; the leafy greens I find in the west tend to be very overgrown, and as a result taste worse (less taste overall, and more bitter than average), less crunchy, and much more stringy and fibrous than in indigenous Chinese cooking.

But it would help to know which vegetables you’re actually using. None of the above is very useful if you’re trying to eat pumpkin.

Right now I mostly eat tomatoes in the form of homemade tomato sauce, onions in the form of cooking them up in sauces or burrito fillings, and that's about it. I mean, I'll eat other vegetables at restaurants and functions, but cooking at home that's pretty much it. Maybe once every couple of weeks I'll make fried rice, I throw some canned peas and carrots in that. If we're getting fancy I might put some canned green beans in a bowl as a side.

Are there any vegetables you‘ve had in the past that you liked and would like to replicate?