Book Review: Vegetables
I love vegetables. Your everyday carrots, onions, celery. Seasonal asparagus, peas, fingerling potatoes, ears of sweet corn. Rich, leafy spinach, kale, brightly colored Swiss chard. Pretty vegetables like eggplant, red bell peppers, heirloom tomatoes. Winter brussel sprouts, squash, turnips. And even the scary monsters like kohlrabi and celeriac, the stuff of childhood nightmares when spied unwashed on the drainboard.
And I love nosing around Frank’s Produce in the Pike Place Market, asking what’s new, what’s good right now, when to consider waiting a few weeks for the really good stuff to arrive. Walking home with stuffed market bags, tops overflowing with fronds of fennel, carrot tops, beet greens.
And I don’t hesitate to buy what I don’t yet understand, because at home I keep my secret weapon: Vegetables
For me, there are two things that destroy a cookbook focused on vegetables: the assumption that readers are vegetarians, and the idea that readers are looking for “healthy” recipes. Either one of those present, and I lower my sights from pursuing the sublime, to pursuing the merely “tasty.” Which makes me want to eat fewer veggies, and how healthy is that?
Fortunately, Peterson’s book is neither. Rather, it’s an encyclopedic exploration and celebration of the glories of vegetables, as main dishes or sides. Whether lightly treating baby carrots or shelled peas to let flavor and texture shine, or sliding in a bit of duck fat or prosciutto and champagne vinegar to enrich and elevate lowly cabbages and leathery, bitter greens. You’ll never again be without a strategy for those oddball surprises hiding at the bottom of the CSA produce delivery box.