Entree or Sides

[talon]

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook23-2009dec23,0,5692456.story

I don't have that problem. I love vegetables of all kinds (except okra). And grains.

For Thanksgiving this year, we had an appetizer made of vegetables and bread (the bready cornucopia filled with broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, bell pepper strips, celery, jicama sticks, grape tomatoes, and sugar peas with an artichoke dip and a veggie dip), a clear soup with scallions and carrots floating in it, mashed potatoes, braised Brussels sprouts, dilled baby carrots, grilled cabbage and onions, vanilla creamed corn, steamed green beans with bacon bits and pearl onions, roasted sweet potato cubes, and a pickle plate to go with the Cornish hens (1 for every 4 people), and then we had a tossed green salad and Texas Caviar salad (black eyed pea salad) for a total of around 25 different vegetables. All our feasts are heavy on the vegetables.

It's what I hate most about eating out - the choice of vegetables is so limited (corn, green beans, potatoes, carrots, every now and then a brassica like broccoli or cauliflower or Brussels sprouts and rarely, peas), and the meat dish is so very huge. When you do get vegetables, they come in quarter cup servings usually waterlogged and flavorless - and sometimes even colorless! I've received green beans so pale they looked like strands of cloudy cellophane and corn so washed out they looked like white barley pearls and peas so overcooked they turned to mush. It takes less time to cook up vegetables than it does a good meat entrée that vegetables should be much better than they are.

When I think of holidays, my mind flitters among all the vegetable choices and it's not until I've chosen all the vegetables that I even think about the meat. Vegetables can pair up with almost any meat, but when there are lots of vegetables, some meats stand up to some combinations better than others. Red meats can handle a vegetable spread composed mostly of heavy vegetables - root and stalks. Poultry and white meats do better with blend of vegetables - a few roots, mostly vine and stalks, a few leafies. Seafood likes lighter vegetables unless it's a dense fish like swordfish or shark - mostly vine and leafies, some stalks and roots. Preparation is more important than the kind of vegetable. Still, the vegetable palette helps determine the meat, not the reverse. Thanksgiving was all over the vegetable world, so poultry was best.

Solstice was weighted to the root vegetables, so we went with red meat: mashed potatoes, steamed baby chioga beets, carrot coins, an onion puree, twice baked sweet potatoes, thin sliced kohlrabi, sliced and batter fried rutabagas, parsnip sticks, and cattail tubers. We had a thick grilled steak, cubed and tossed in a sauce over rice to lighten up the root vegetable sides. And we chose berries for dessert to herald in the soon to be lengthening days.

I suppose others prefer to dream of meat, but I prefer the wide spectrum of colorful, flavorful vegetables, with just a small side of meat.