Iowa teen grew 7k pounds of veggies, then gave them all away
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The problem with a home garden is you usually have nothing, then a few things, then inundated with too much.
I bet even now at a temp of 1C if I look there is a sneaky zucchini hiding under a leaf! One year spinach survived the winter (-20C ish and 1m snow) and popped up in April.
First, a lot of English-speaking countries place lower importance on veggies. We got calcium from milk and cheese, so we didn't need to learn how to cook well with lots of dark leafy greens, as an example.
Second, European meals tend to focus heavily on a main and some side dishes, but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal. You're not trying to think of ways to cook squash, because the dinner is squash.
Finally (there are more, but I don't want to get too crazy in the comments), European cooking tends to focus more on using a wide variety of ingredients. In contrast, you'll find a lot of SE Asian cooking uses many of the same ingredients, but they prepare the food in vastly different ways, leading to some completely different dishes. This means that they naturally have a huge repertoire of ways to modify their veggies to fit any meal.
I have no real point, I just never get to talk about this stuff and I find it really interesting. If I was wrong about anything, please correct me below.
Can you provide some examples? I can't think of any.
It's not Latin/South American, it's not European, it's not Chinese, it's not Japanese, it's not like anywhere I've been in Africa, and it doesn't match my knowledge of India or the Middle East.
Nor can I imagine any country where "dinner is squash" makes much sense. Squash has almost no calories, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to center a meal on.
Cuisines often have occasional meals that are complete enough to be eaten as a single dish -- some kind of protein-mixed-in-with-carbs like lasagna or paella or chicken stroganoff. But these seem to be exceptions in the cuisine, rather than the rule.
Could you elaborate with some specific countries where the one-dish pattern is the norm?
A zucchini boat is basically just zucchini stuffed with meat, cheese, tomato, onions, and spices. That's the whole meal. Stuffed peppers is basically the same thing, but with peppers instead of zucchini.
To be clear, I didn't mean that it was literally a single dish, I meant that instead of trying to compliment your meal properly with a matching veggie, because you're only making one thing. As long as it all makes sense together in the bowl/plate/hand, it works.
Some examples of things we'd eat as the entire meal:
* Fatteh/tisi'yeh, a dish made with a layer of bread, then boiled chickpeas, then yoghurt, and topped with some toasted pine nuts, melted ghee, paprika. Sometimes in a restaurant, this is part of a larger spread of food.
* Any variety of kebbeh (there are many). We'd eat this with bread. In a restaurant, kebbeh would not be the singular dish.
* Various things referred "tabakh" (lit. cooking lol) which we'd usually eat with rice or burghal (crushed wheat) cooked with vermicelli noodles. You can then say that's multiple dishes, but it's kind of like bread. Examples: bazala (peas, carrots, maybe potatoes, coriander in a tomato sauce) on rice, fasulya (white beans in a tomato sauce) on rice or burghal, al-asiyeh (potatoes, carrots, corriander stew) on burghal, spanegh (spinach, minced meat, pine nuts) with rice, and many others. Most of this is sometimes cooked with diced lamb of shredded chicken.
* Lahm bi ajeen (minced meat cooked with onions and molasses on dough with pinenuts) would be sufficient a meal, sometimes perhaps with a quick salad. Not a complete meal in a restaurant typically.
* We were more than happy to throw diced lamb (skewered with some onions), kafta, or chicken on the barbecue and eat with bread, maybe a garlic dip for chicken, occasionally with a salad, occasionally throwing some potatoes or similar vegetables on the barbecue. In a restaurant, a barbecue dish would have many sides.
* We'd pan fry some diced lamb in ghee, drizzle some pomegranate molasses and eat with bread.
* Pan fried potatoes with eggs on top, eaten with bread.
* Pasta cooked in yoghurt + coriander and garlic.
* A leafy green like spinach called sili', not sure what it is in english, cooked with black eye beans, then a squeeze of lemon and eaten with bread.
* Foule which is just fava beans stewed, we'd eat with bread. Squeeze of lemon. Maybe some pickles, olives, tomato, and cucumber on the side. In a restaurant, this'd probably be part of a wider breakfast spread.
All this is to say, it was normal to serve food from a single pot or tray and eat with utensils or bread, or from two pots placing rice/burghal on the plate then scooping the "tabakh" on top.
For us bread is very normal throughout the day, it is thin, we'd rip off a bit to grab food, not very heavy. Modern bakeries make bread looking like https://www.yum.com.au/d-lebanese-bread-bag-x-6.html
All said, my parents grew up poor, so that background could reflect our norms. (edit) We also did not grow up around much family, so large gatherings were uncommon for us, which differs from typical Lebanese culture.
I knew a couple from south Lebanon "Si and Sue" Haddad. Si would make me cardamom flavoured coffee and some baklava. Sue made the food eggplant always seemed to be on the go.
Very friendly and a very wide range of food, a great culture to grow up in.
There was literally a 15-year long civil war in Lebanon from mid-70s till 1990
Because traditionally they were served "courses". However, it's all biryani in the belly. I think the old ways of serving a main with sides is still a tip to that era when it was plated separately. I'm ok with having it all mixed together so long as the flavors complement. I don't want a steak, cubed, mixed with my veggies and mashed potatoes, all in a bowl. Some things should be separate, some things are ok being together/combined. Western style cooking has been dominated by French Cuisine and traditional Countryside cooking. Only within the last 30-50 years have they started branching out into Asian or South American dishes.
Its way more approachable today than it ever has been with YouTube videos, online blog recipes, availability of supplies.
Huh? They don't complement??
> Second, European meals tend to focus heavily on a main and some side dishes, but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal.
A ton of German cuisine, especially historically is either Soup or "Eintopf" (literally one-pot). You might add bread, but the dish stands by itself. Especially in the winter time, this is something people still do a lot. Still looking forward to kale (Grühnkohl, or where I'm from: Braunkohl). I still love stuff like Schmohrkohl and Grühnkohl. Not so much the carrot and potato soup and things like that.
PS: I'd consider "Auflauf" (casserole?) to be a one-pot dish as well.
Which ones? In the US, we are told to eat our veggies because they are good for you. The problem in the US is that something forced women into the workplace and families are resorting to easy processed meals like microwave dinners, fast food, etc.
In college I would buy a bag of pre-cut flash frozen vegetables suitable for a stir fry and just dump that into the wok and throw some sauce & protein.
Abroad where people eat fresh vegetables I had the habbit of ordering food delivery everyday because I'm not going to waste 1 hour of my life every day washing & cutting vegetables and the knife and the cutting board etc.
But even if the dinner is squash, you still want to think of different ways to prepare it, don't you?
This is how I, in the US, was fed while growing, and is how I do things to this day. I didn't realize that there was a cultural variation on this (or that my habit wasn't the common case in my own culture!)
Today I learned...
Getting into gardening helped me understand how big of a role fermentation, drying, and canning played in our lived up until the spread of refrigeration.
Also, for stuff like lettuce, you can plant several series of seeds a week or two apart to get a "conveyor belt" of product instead of a bit glut if your season is long enough- but it is a lot of effort.
If you do your own starts, you can do what I do with peppers:
* overwinter a few plants in containers, they'll be ready quickly when you put htem back out just after last freeze.
* start some plants in mid jan, some in mid feb, and some in mid march, to fewer are ready at various times. Of course peppers will produce fruits over an extended period.
Tomatoes are similar, and you can also use vining varietals that produce fewer tomatoes continuously (rather than all at once).
For a lot of leafy plants (spinach, leaf lettuces) i plant them in with my bigger plants - they'll be done by the time the other plants are big enough to crowd/shade them out.
A lot of plants come out in mid to late summer. If your climate allows it, you can plant brassicas (like broccoli) when you pull those out an they'll thrive in the cool fall weather.
As another commenter mentioned, various cultivars can have different timings.
All of this is a little bit of extra work in the garden, and quite a bit more planning (but I like that part, and after a bit of practice it's not that much effort either, I'll do it over a few evenings in January. It helps to have other gardening friends over for dinner and garden planning/seed buying - more fun and less like work). The result is an extended period of available produce without as much of a "glut" at peak.
It annoys me to no end that a lot of garden plants are still designed around the home garden being a mini-farm rather than a continuing source of fresh produce. This made a lot more sense 100 years ago, but these days it seems counter-productive, most people don't grow gardens to preserve food over the winter, but rather to have fresh veggies while enjoying gardening (and maybe to cut out the produce bill in the summer)
I used to hate zucchini. But then I started eating lower carb and found ways to enjoy it. A few simple tips made a big difference:
* Add lots of sodium. Not necessarily pure table salt; fish sauce or Better than Bouillon are really nice. These vegetables have very very little salt on their own. The mainstream public health advice still seems to be that Americans eat too much salt, but (a) I probably was eating less than most, and (b) the advice may be wrong for most people, and (c) it may be particularly wrong when eating low-carb and/or particularly active (I exercise about 1 hour per day). <https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto/supplements#sodium> has a nice section about this with references.
* Sautée chopped veggies (zucchini, eggplant, cabbage, whatever), again with sodium. Then make it into a shakshuka-esque dish (add canned tomato, spices, and egg then broil; maybe also cheese or canned fish) or add in some ground meat/sausage + cheese + spices + low-sugar ketchup + mustard. I use my cast iron skillet a lot now.
* Spiralize; use as pasta noodles with a thick sauce.
* Use neutral veggie puree to replace the bulk of sugar in baked desserts, combining with concentrated liquid sweetener (sucralose, stevia, monkfruit). Requires some recipe tweaks because you're replacing a dry ingredient with a wet one but I had pumpkin almond butter mousse brownies today that were good.
I eat lots of dark leafy greens too. I often steam them in a Pyrex in the microwave then enclose in cheesecloth and squeeze the water out with tongs. Salt and pepper, throw into almost any savory dish, use as a base for a modified juevos rancheros, etc.
Takes longer to prepare but if you bake them in the oven you'll get a similar result but won't lose all those nutrients in the water
Side note - you really are a maverick kind of cook lol
Interesting point! I wonder how much I am losing.
> Side note - you really are a maverick kind of cook lol
I choose to take that as a compliment. :-)
Yes, I like miso and soy sauce too. Salt + umami = yum. But the salt is the vital part for low carb eaters like me. The "keto flu" is no joke. I'm not even a keto person (not that strict) but I've had weakness, headaches, cramps, and heart palpitations when I had insufficient electrolytes. I don't want to repeat that!
And if you want to go another route, you can make any vegetable into wine.
I blame cheap carbs and lack of education around cooking; we need to bring back Home Economics classes and teach the new generation.
https://www.maricruzavalos.com/quesadillas-de-flor-de-calaba...
There are lots of resources available on lacto-fermentation, but basically you need some clean jars, salt, and clean water, plus some spices. Fermented vegetables do not spoil for many months, and are great soup bases for cream soups.
TIL. I was under impression that Zucchini and spinach are popular. At least in stores it seems like they are selling quickly. Sure if Zucchini is big one no-one wants to eat it but small ones?
I call my garden the “lucky garden” because only what survives my abuse and neglect survives.
Still end up with tons of tomatoes (from like mid-June and still eating the last to ripen indoors now), kale, peppers, parsley, basil, random squash & zucchini.
It’s all about yield÷effort for me.
It's not for everyone, but it certainly worked in my case. ;)
My version was 40 broccoli vs thousands of slugs. Apparently they smell it from as far as they can travel in a life time.
That being said, 1000s of slugs is practically insurmountable unless you plan to salt the Earth (figurately and literally) or kill the entire neighborhood with fire. Both have...consequences beyond the initial issue. ;)
The solution would be for everyone in the neighborhood to grow food and get rid of their car so that the hedgehog population can grow to match the food supply.
It saved our broccoli and cabbage.
4-5 bottles of beer per day could buy a lot of broccoli. It didn't add up.
That's literally wild, haha. Was it still edible?
Zucchini is great steamed with yellow squash and vidalia onions and seasoned with fresh pepper.
Basically there are these cutters which cut the zucchini (raw) into very long "noodles". I think they are sometimes called "zoodles".
With these "noodles" you can do anything you like. But I've only tried it as a salad. i.e. add oil, salt, pepper and whatever you like, mix it, and enjoy.
And it always seems to be squash and zucchini.
They're like "Hey I'm going to grow some vegetables this year".
Then on a late summer day they're like: "So uhh yeah, I have a problem. Do you happen to need 47 pounds of squash?"
Rotate your nightshades, people! If you keep planting tomatoes/potatoes/eggplants/etc in the same plot year after year, the Fusarium will build up and destroy your yield.
My grandparents grew 30 tomato plants and had so many that even after canning over 100 quarts of tomato sauce they still couldn't keep up with all the tomatoes on the vines.
Once canning is done I would dry the rest.
For swiss chard, instead of the shred/squeeze step I just chop and cook before freezing.
The larger point is that I have been slowly moving to the bulk of my garden space being dedicated to vegetables that can, in one way or another be preserved (canned, tried, fermented, frozen, or just straight up stored like winter squash, onions, and garlic), with only relatively small amounts being dedicated to things that _must_ be eaten fresh.
A family member let us pick pounds of them from one of his trees because he can’t get rid of them fast enough. I’ve been enjoying them diced with pumpkin seeds and manchego in salads, and even the very firm ones work great in the dehydrator, skin and all.
I have no frame of reference of any of them, but the anthropologist within me is fascinated you all seem to.
It's like, lets take this wild unit system where we have bespoke units for every scale, but then for this one we'll use a sane prefix.
It’s over 2 years, but nonetheless impressive yield on an acre of land. I wonder how it compares to the standard 1 acre lot for corn or soybeans.
Iowa has the most fertile soil on earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-iowa-town-famous-f...
So, somewhat less than an intensive field crop, but the same order of magnitude.
The standard 1-acre lot of corn or soybeans product goes into most anything other than a person’s mouth. It’s like comparing an acre of backyard garden to an acre of hay.
Juicing 10 lbs of vegetables a day still causes you to lose weight, but that's at a mix of sugary and non sugary vegetables. I think if you did beets, carrots, apples, 10 lbs a day would be enough for an adult male to have good energy and not lose weight.
So around 3000 lbs a year considering women would need less.
You do not need heavily processed oils and grains nor do you need a variety of supplements. Beans and Rice contain all of the necessary proteins a human body needs for example.
B12 deficiency is an issue even for people that eat meat due to the cleaner practices and feeding where animals no longer graze but instead get their food delivered in a way that doesn't allow the animals to ingest the B12 from the dirt.
You can absolutely survive eating food that is not cooked with oil.
You could maybe make it if you ate a couple pounds of beans a day with dirt on them. I really think your digestive tract would struggle though.
We consume way more calories than we need. Should be easy with corn (part of the three sisters).
The dictionary definition of vegetable (according to dictionary.com) is:
> any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food
Which would include grains, however you may be excluding those depending on if "heavily processed" modifies only the oil, or the grains as well.
Of course culinarily in western traditions, grains and a lot of tubers are excluded from that, as are some fruits (others, culinarily speaking, are considered vegetables like squashes, tomatoes, and so on).
Also, in your question, would olive oil count? Its literally the result of squishing olives.... does that count as heavily processed?
Do you count potatoes? They are pretty calorie dense. Beans? Plenty of calories and lots of protein.
What about seed foods - nuts and such? They are also calorie dense and have a lot of fats too.
Point being - it's really unclear what limitations you're placing on it... peanuts, beans, (sweet) potatoes, squashes and fruits are commonly grown in home gardens, widely considered vegetables, and calorie dense enough to sustain a person fairly easily without non-stop eating.
Honestly feels great and my blood test comes back okay each time.
The only issue is when I’m away from home my options is basically Chipotle.
So, to the ancestor's point: Not just vegetables, but higher caloric-density grains.
I think the "heavily processed oils and grains, and a variety of supplements" part was also important to their point, and that's what I was disputing and qualifying.
And their assertion about "modern" vegan diets and my reference to "pre-modern" Okinawan diets is not really a contradiction either. You can easily eat the "pre-modern" Okinawan diet in Okinawa today (and in other places with grocery stores). I'm using pre-modern very loosely to indicate it is not the most common contemporary diet. Many dietary patterns across the world have Westernized/"modernized" (and as a result, many, though by no means all, have become less healthy).
The comment talks about eating "only vegetables", but it's being misinterpreted as "can you survive on a vegan diet" and even "do vegetarians exist"
The question was "can you survive eating only vegetables?" No beans, chickpeas, peanuts, no nuts, no grains, no fruit.
(according to oxford):
a plant or part of a plant used as food
(according to webster):
a usually herbaceous plant (such as the cabbage, bean, or potato) grown for an edible part that is usually eaten as part of a meal
(according to dictionary.com)
any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food
Which should include beans, chickpeas, peanuts, nuts, fruit, grains, etc.
If the question was about something else, maybe they should have used the words that mean what they want to ask instead?
So tomatoes are out?
1: https://food52.com/recipes/30420-creamy-zucchini-yogurt-soup
That's one of the reasons I like tech news. We have some positivity in the form of "Check out this cool new tool!" or "I did this weird thing with a 1,000 Rasberry Pi units." Tech news can be educational and entertaining without reporting on everything awful in the world, though there's some of that too.
Not very salty about this. This is just an Internet comment.
The intuitiveness of the imperial units actually don't demand much thinking from my American pea brain: an inch is about the width of my thumb, a pound is about the weight of how much meat/grain I can fit in my hands, a mile is about a thousand paces - it's actually quite simple and intuitive, which is perfect for a dumb stupid American like me.
I can't imagine doing something like woodworking without my brainlet system. Inches are a nice "bite-size" unit that fractionates quite nicely for cutting wood. They don't make me think too much. In metric, my thumb would be about 2.53 centimeters, the kerf of my saw is 1/8 an inch, and that's like 253/800cm as a fraction - yikes! An inch is a good whole number to start working from.
And then like - what's a centimeter even? It's one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator passing through Paris. Woah - get me outta here! That's just too much numerology for me. And my brain can't relate to or conceptualize that. Again, because I'm just so stupid, and American. I have to stick to the simple stuff: thumb -> inch, pound -> fits in my hands, mile -> thousand paces, gallon -> 10 pounds of water.
About the thickness of your pinkie.
A kilo is about 1/2 a lb so it's not really wildly different.
> pound -> fits in my hands
> gallon -> 10 pounds of water.
How do you do 10 handfuls of water?
Not like that arrogant metric, for which he can find no useful representation...for some reason
A reason that is clearly about the utility of metric itself rather than one's constant use of imperial.
People living in metric countries have these sorts of “intuitive” relationships figured out. If you ever go to Europe, you will not see people anxiously furrowing their brows over their calculators to figure out how much things weigh or how far it is to the end of the block.
And, of course, there’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/526/
Everything was easy to do in your head:
5cm + 15cm = 20cm
0.5kg + 0.15kg = 0.65kg
2900mm / 2 = 1450mm.
Now I'm forced to do mental gymnastics like:
5/8" + 7/16" = ???
2'9 1/4" + 14" = ???
11'4"1/4 / 2 = ???
1lb9oz / 2 = ???
It's not impossible, but it takes me a lot more time to think through these things, and often they are impossible to even punch into a calculator. Adding fractions of an inch in my head was not something I learned in school (honestly, my experience since moving to the US is that most adult Americans also struggle to add fractions of an inch).
It's just not that big a deal in my experience. And if I want to use millimeters, every ruler and tape measure has those too. For all the bitching about the US not using metric, we in fact use it for many things. But it's customary to use imperial for discussion, and I don't get why that hurts people's feelings. I don't care about the UK weighing people in stones...
Even outside of the legacy imperial unit systems, there will always be units not nicely expressed in metric units that are handy nevertheless and good to know and use. Like electron-volts.
Metric is more clean. Example: you have a cube of 1 meter, filled halfway with water. You can calculate the volume of water as being 1 * 1 * 0.5 cubic meter. 1 cubic meter is 1000 liter (ho ho, the magic already manifests), so 0.5 cubic meter is 500 liter. I even know the approximate weight is 500kg, as 1 liter of water ≈ 1 kilo.
Doing this in cubic yards/feet + fluidic ounce + pounds is not even in the same universe in terms of elegance or ease-of-use. Swapping the fluidic ounce to liter does not solve that and probably introduces whackier ratios.
That does not mean you are a bad person for using imperial, but stating that "its easy to convert" isn't wholly fair either.
Washington: “Nothing”
* metric ton; 1000kg
* short ton; 907kg
* long ton; 1016kg
not to mention its use as a measure of volume and power.
Confused the hell out of me when I went from nice clean metric units in school to a structural engineering practice still using Us standard units.
I also recommend cherry tomatoes. More snackable, easier to use them up.
If you harvest the tips then harvests grow with geometric progression.
Actually, relying on charitable teenagers to solve large systemic problems doesn't seem much like "helping."
Nor do articles like these.
They just paper over the problems to maintain the status quo.
Might be different in Iowa.
You were asking them to take on a labor and space intensive project they didn’t ask for, that might require additional food production safety training to maintain legal compliance. Do they have enough fridge space? Do they have access to a commissary kitchen to process it? Do their customers want it?
If you offered them ready to distribute bags of veg from your plants I’m guessing they might take it.
Charities often run into this problem of someone offering something they didn’t ask for or need, and having to deal with it.
Externally it can seem like an obvious thing: of course the food bank wants greens!
Internally it looks more like: this guy wants to give us an indeterminate amount of his garden veggies, which we might have to process, and aren’t produced in a facility that we can guaranty is safe. we normally only accept donations of dry and canned goods and source our own fresh food for these reasons. Is it worth our time to make an exception?
They can do meat, milk, and produce.