Making memories one day at a time.......and then I write about it.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Squash the veggies.

Have you ever wondered why certain veggies have the names that they do?

After eating them I don't. I know EXACTLY why they are named what they are.

Some veggies I can handle more than others. I know veggies are good for us and so I choke them down and try to come up with all sorts of ways to cook with them so that I can neither taste or see them.....works for my punks too.......

Speaking of choke..........artiCHOKE........or aSPARaGAS......BEETS......SQUASH....there is a reason so many veggies are under the "squash" category.

When I was a young whipper snapper along with my bigger and younger whipper snapper accomplices one of the places that we liked to play was down in the basement in the food storage room. We'd play "grocery store" and pretend that we were shopping. One of us would be the cashier and the other two would "shop" loading up our baskets making purchases and then we'd trade places.

One day as we were shopping we discovered to our horror of horrors that under the table that we were using as the check out stand were these huge yellow football looking things and some of them were big enough we could lash them together and make a raft.

We whipper snappers looked at each other and we had only one thought.......survival! We knew that at some point during the long winter months our mother would go A-wall and delight in watching us as she shoved that stuff down our poor throats.

My older whipper snapper accomplice had already sabotaged the aSPARaGAS by weeding and pulling them all up and then innocently when mom wondered why none of her spears of death hadn't produced....."I don't know mom but there isn't a single one out there".

Survive we must and so we did the only thing that such young vulnerable beings could do...WE FOUGHT BACK. We grabbed some chopsticks and started stabbing the retched soul sucking creatures of the vine to death.

We knew that we had time on our side. When mom finally found them, they would be shriveled and moldy doomed for the compost pile where they deserved to be......

Squash......ya, I know EXACTLY where they came up with that name...

4 comments:

  1. HA! I feel the same way about vegetables. Now unfortunately it's me trying to make me eat them instead of my mom. what a drag. I have to cook them now AND eat them. You feel my pain I'm sure!

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  2. OOOhhh, the joy of childhood. Can't blame us. Mom just forgot about them and left them in the basement too long!!!

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  3. I only like two. Two veggies. When I started cooking, I realized how few we mainstream USA middle classers have. Not like the stuff my grandma had to work with in the south.

    I used to hide the veggies my mom left me at the table to eat (sit there till they're gone) in the box she'd pried them out of (frozen) before dinner. Who looks in the box in the trash for cooked spinach? But when I tried the disposal, she kind of caught on . . .

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  4. Actually, SparGas is the only thing I have ever thrown up on an airplane. My father was disgusted, like I'd done it on purpose. Just because HE could swallow the stuff . . .

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