When Your Mama Told You to Eat Your Veggies...

Last week we had a fun little traitorous conversation on this blog about fruit we don't like, to put it mildly. Yesterday evening I was sitting there with my 1 lb bag of okra (which is actually classified as a FRUIT, by the way) and wondering why so many I've talked to think it's so nasty and vile.

It made me upset, so I thought today I'd take the opportunity to make fun of some of YOUR favorite veggies. Shall we discuss the veggies we think are gross (particularly when eaten uncooked)? :)

Here are my top four. I have not touched ANY of these in at least 16 months.

Kale
I used to force feed this to my family and myself. All because of a book I read called Super Baby Food, written by a vegetarian Mom of twin boys, Ruth Yaron.

She used to be my hero when my boys were babies, and although I do not agree with her health philosophy anymore, I still appreciate her efforts to make her idea of healthy eating go mainstream.

But! But! It was because of her that I forced buckets and buckets of kale into my poor mouth. She swore that kale was the secret to health (or something like that) :) because it apparently has such a high level of calcium.

She even said somewhere in her book that her insurance company lowered her premiums because she ate soooo much kale, even drinking the leftover "juice" in the blender from making her kids' kale baby food.

Just thinking about it today makes me turn green. Now, I have to say, cooked kale ain't THAT bad. First of all, cooking it makes it shrink from a formidable mountain into just some marshy flatlands. Second when you add tomato sauce, salt or oil to anything cooked it of course makes it go from gross to gourmet in 30 seconds.

But raw kale just tastes nasty in my mouth and it doesn't feel great digesting in my stomach either. I'll be happy if I never have another bite of kale ever again. At least my gag reflex got a good workout back when I used to eat it, I guess.

Broccoli
I liked cooked broccoli. Loved it, in fact. All nice and tender and juicy. But raw broccoli is something else. It tastes so green in not a good way. Also it is tough and mealy and makes me feel like I'm eating a baby tree. I swear I'd hear them screaming with terror as I crunched into them. It gave me guilt trips every time.

Carrots
Now carrots are something else. I actually like the taste of them. One of my favorite childhood memories is my Mom chopping up veggies in the kitchen, and slipping me bits of them before they went in to the wok. Carrots used to be my favorite raw veggie.

I ate truckloads of carrots when I was a kid. We went through this phase where my Mom made me carrot juice every single day because my eyesight was horrible and she read that the vit A would help that. (No, it didn't.) It tasted pretty okay, though.

The reason I don't eat carrots nowadays, is because they hurt me when I eat them. I think they are too starchy for my digestive system to handle now. It's a surefire tummyache for me if I eat more than one or two baby carrots. So I just abstain. But I don't miss them all that much...

Random embarassing fact: I used to really think that baby carrots were...well...baby carrots. :)

Artichokes
Yeah yeah, I know they taste good swimming in butter and garlic, but have you ever TRIED a raw artichoke? 'Nuff said.

Eating what I like. Hurrah!
Basically with veggies, I find that the fruit veggies and the tender leafy greens taste best AND digest best for me. So I tend to stick to those. I'm game to try other things occasionally, but most of the other things taste tough and gross to me. So I rarely bother. :)

What about you? Which veggies do you absolutely think are icky raw, and did you like them cooked before?