All cuisines in the world offer cooked vegetables as part of their daily menu. This is a

well-proven, ancient tradition—people on a habitual diet that includes vegetables had

consistently better health and had a better chance of survival. Vegetables’ high vitamin, mineral

and fiber content is essential to human diet, thus the daily dose of vegetables kept our ancestors’

bodies in good order.

Aside from health benefits, vegetables also possess wonderful flavor, appealing texture

and great temptation to our taste buds when properly prepared. On today’s American and

Canadian tables no one considers a meal complete without either cooked or raw vegetables.

Luckily, vegetables are in. Today an average supermarket caries 240 items in the produce section

the majority of which are vegetables.

Vegetable cookery is simple, yet it takes a certain amount of kitchen know-how to serve

vegetables with optimum flavor, best texture, magazine-cover presentation and still retain most

of their nutrients.

What are vegetables

We all know that vegetables, whether edible or not, are part of plants—potatoes are

enlarged parts of the roots, carrots are the roots themselves, celery is the main stalk, spinach is

the leaf, artichoke is the flower and eggplant is the fruit. Mushrooms are exceptions. They don’t

belong in the Plant Kingdom but are fungi. Several parts of certain plant may be edible, such as

the root and leaves of turnips and beets, while in some plants a certain part is edible, others may

be poisonous. The enlarged root of the potato plant is perfectly healthy to eat but the poisonous

leaves you want to eat only if you are contemplating suicide. Rhubarb has a wonderful edible

stalk but the leaves can kill you.

All vegetables have fibers, a substance essential to human health, but some have more,

others have less. Fibers give rigidity and shape to the living plant. We cannot digest fibers, which

are organic substance called cellulose, so they have no nutritive values to the body. But we

cannot digest our foods without them.

The vegetables that cook quickly, e.g. cabbage, have relatively low amounts of fiber,

those that are slow-cooking, such as artichoke, are often high in fiber. Age also determines how

much fiber a vegetable has. The older it is, the more fibrous. A young kohlrabi is soft and tender

like a fresh radish, while an old one is hard to cut through with a knife, it is so full of tough

fibers. The root-end parts of plants have higher fiber content than the blossom-end part. The

bottom portion of an asparagus is full of coarse, tough fibers while the young top velvety-tender

tips have very little.

Vegetables in the Kitchen

Cooking for best appearance

There are pigments that Nature uses to dye vegetables. Intensely colored vegetables on

the plate give a great impact to our visual senses that translates to heightening appetites. Our

early American heritage from English and northern European immigrants favored overcooked

Serious Kitchen Play