Fuck You, Broccoli

Yeah, more like Honeydon't, AMIRITE?

Then again, if you've ever tasted a really good honeydew melon - and they do exist (though you have to get yourself invited to a brunch at Kennebunkport or a really high-end bat mitzvah or something) - you realize that real honeydew melon is actually fucking amazing, and 99%* of the rest of them are just watered-down crap, and then you stop being blasé about being served bad fruit, and instead get militantly angry. Fuck the fruitiers! To the ramparts! Let us not stop till the last transgressor lays rotting in its rind!

Or you just stick to cantaloupe. Whatever.

I will be blogging more sporadically until end of summer. It's just too hot to hate effectively.

Oh, Shiitake mushrooms. What can I say about a fungus whose name comes from the word for excrement combined with the word for bodily discomfort?

Not much.

1/10. Just the thought of you gives me the shit-aches.

The following is a true story:

Picture a strapping young man, fresh out of college, sent to the store with his nubile young girlfriend to pick up a number of last-minute items for some family dinner (what the hell, let's call it Thanksgiving - one of those fancy meals where the cook shows off and no one cares because they're so sick of being with family already and all anyone really wants to do is watch the Longhorns beat the Aggies or hunker down in the john and have a really satisfying bowel movement or anything else that doesn't involve eating foods cooked with capers. You get the idea). So anyway, somewhere on the shopping list is the word "Capers."  Which, okay, both the guy and the girl have seen before on restaurant plates, but neither one knows what they are. Some sort of shellfish? A condiment? A savory ice cream novelty? 

Well, since the girl didn't want to admit that she had no idea at all where to look, and the guy wouldn't ask directions to a water fountain if his dick was on fire, let alone how to navigate a grocery aisle, the adorable pair had no choice but to wander the aisles looking everywhere for a (bag? box? maybe you scape them out of a gourd? how the fuck should I know?) of the thing. After literally 45 minutes of combing every aisle, the girl finally asked a clerk. Who went to three entirely different places before finding them above the pickles. Apparently, they are pickled caper berries, which a) who the fuck knew and b) what the fuck is a caper berry and seriously? Seriously?  Anyhow, because of that whole long ridiculous wander the young couple had the chance to really get to know each other in those cute and hilarious ways you often see in rom-com montages, leading to the guy asking the girl to marry him and long story short, they got divorced.

So, yeah, capers?  Pointless.  Also you taste like a squeaky band-aid and leave an oily stench in the mouth which can only be taken away with massive quantities of tequila. Much like most marriages.

But I'm not bitter.

3/10. I can eat around you.

Wow - that makes perfect sense.

Oh, shallots, you babies are the exception that proves the rule. Little interlocking layers of heaven. All the good things that onions do, plus you're smaller, only come in one color and you don't make me cry. And no one even attempts to serve you raw. I would seriously have hot steamy sexual relations with a shallot if you only had a more conducive shape. But you don't.

Dammit, shallots.  We came so close.

8/10. 9 when fried on top of a burger. Ohhhhhhh yeah.

Yeah, that pretty much sums you up.

I don't get you at all. Are you the heart of a palm tree? A palm leaf? A palmetto bug? Because I've seen all three and I never saw anyone gnawing on any of them. Except for termites, or maybe the occasional beaver on vacation. I've been to all sorts of produceries over the course of my life, and I've never even seen you outside of your natural canned state, which leads me to believe you actually grow in the wild inside little naturally-occurring sealed mason jars, just waiting for someone gullible to pick you up and stick you in the pantry for 8-10 years to mature (I dunno, maybe the extra layer of dust around the lid adds flavor?).

And what is that cloudy liquid you're bathing in, anyhow? Spit of Palm? Blood of Palm? Pee of Palm? That would make sense, since you're always (heh) in the can (rimshot!)  All's I know is, pas de Palm for me. That's French for I'll pass.

4/10, so long as you stay in the jar.

Eggplants, you are the swollen, uncomfortable conflagration of a squash and a distended placenta.  The color of a fresh bruise (or a festering bedsore) on the outside and of hardened smegma on the inside, you manage to be simultaneously slimy and mushy, no mean feat. For me, it's your overall squashyness that sets my teeth on edge with every bite. Like biting into an apple but finding a larval worm, only instead of an apple, it's something really good like lasagna, and instead of a worm it's something really not good, like a human eye. And your taste -- bitter as a mouthful of antifreeze, with the added aftertaste of aged cheese vomit.

What's worse, everything bad I have ever said about other vegetables applies to you: You're lousy raw but inedible cooked. You start to decay as soon as you're opened and your inner color runs to all the various shades of snot. They don't even mush you into baby food - and they mush every vegetable into baby food. That's because babies know. You are rancid and evil and do not belong on a plate. Unless it is on fire being thrown from someplace high into someplace pointy. And even then I feel bad for the pointy things.

0/10.  I feel gross just writing about you. If you need me, I'll be in the shower crying like Silkwood for a couple hours just to wash off the ick.

1 bunch collard greens

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups milk chocolate chips

1 beer

Preheat oven to 375° F. Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a separate mixing bowl, mix butter, granulated sugar, vanilla extract and brown sugar until creamy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually add in flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Throw collard greens into trash.

Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets and bake until golden brown. Drink beer while you wait.

0/10. Fuck collard greens.

I think I need a few more parameters to answer this one. Which ones did you have in mind?

There are some adjectives I find myself throwing out here a lot, when it comes to the vegetables I don't like, but also don't find completely inedible.  Benign. Inoffensive. Lackluster. Tasteless. Bland. To name a few.

Mix all those descriptives together, then add lackluster and bland, pointless and stale, and ta-dah! We've got ourselves a water chestnut. You look like so many yummy things that taste-wise, leave you in the dust. Scallops. Gnocchi. Meringues. Chewable Vitamin C's. Wet little globules of crispy spit that look like mush but require actual chewing, you are the kidney stones of the produce section:  Remarkably painful for something so small and natural, not passed easily, and too big to ignore. Sliced, you look like chicken, then bring the world to a screaming halt when you manage to be one of the only nonflavored things on the planet that - even when surrounded by actual chicken - doesn't taste like chicken. You're also the only food I can think of that looks, tastes, and feels identical cooked as raw. How is that even possible?

Are you even a real vegetable, or did someone just invent you in some lab back in the early 80's while trying to discover new ways to make those gummi bracelets and shoes everyone was wearing, send you off to the cannery and we've fallen for it ever since?  I've never seen you except in a can. Are there amber waves of water chestnuts growing in some paddy or billabong or fjord that I'm just unaware of? Who grows you? And why?

3/10 since you don't taste nasty, only bleah. I've already wasted way too many words on something so barely there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this one is probably going to upset some people, but fuck it. Avocados are gross. You smell weird, you taste like suet, and you have a negative texture oddly reminiscent of what you'd find behind a sewage facility in Oz. I don't like your mushy, scabrous insides. I don't like your lumpy, grotesque outsides. I don't like the avocado-colored refrigerator-freezer-washer-dryers everyone pretended to be so thrilled about winning on The Price Is Right in my youth and I don't like the way you're stacked at the entrances of Whole Foods like some sort of freshness shibboleth when, let's face it, you keep way longer than you're good.  I don't like you clogging up all the fancy sushi rolls and I don't like the brownishgreenishpooish-streaky way plates look after you've been eaten. And yes, I hate guacamole. It doesn't even sound like a food. I'm pretty sure Pancho Villa died from a bad case of guacamole.

And frankly, the way people suspend your giant ballsacs seeds on toothpicks in a little bowl on their kitchen windowsills gives me the shrieking fantods. Like I'm looking at mini versions of those pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers... AND NOBODY KNOWS IT BUT ME.

You, good sir, are not a fruit: You are not sweet, you do not work in fondue, and you have no Pop Tart. Q.E.D.  You are nothing but a tree-vegetable (the lowest-hanging of all). I spit on your grove.

2/10. You're rich in potassium. Or so I'm told.

Rutabagas, you are another one of those vegetables that if I hadn't seen you myself, I would insist didn't actually exist. I mean, really: you're a root vegetable that looks like a clod of dirt, are almost impossible to wash yet have one of those shapes that makes a person almost guaranteed to slice themself when peeling, and at best tastes like a mushy turnip?  I don't see the point. Then there's your name, which is at best a great punchline, and at worst the Plains Indian word for "manioc, but suckier".

The nice thing about the name "rutabaga," though, is that you really do roll off the tongue, making it easy to toss off poetry such as

There once was a young rutabaga,

Who looked like Manuel Noriega

But its taste was so vile

People ran for a mile

For the chance to burn down the bodega

* and *

An heiress in Balenciaga

In cafés would seek Rutabahhgas

Until one day she tried

Them, and afterwards died

And that is the end of her saga.

So um, yeah. Thanks for the laughs, I guess. But I'm still not eating you.

2/10. I'll float you one point just for not being turnips.

Truth be told, I'm mostly on board with onions. You make stews taste all stewy, you're awesome caramelized on top of burgers or mashed potatoes, and when you're battered and deep fried, it's like God himself came down riding a rainbow-farting pegasus and started scattering gold doubloons and schnauzer puppies all over the populace. 100% pure win.

But like all good things, onions have a dark side.  Raw in a salad? There's just no excuse. Yeah, I know people eat raw fish and raw beef and statistically very few of us die from it. But still, when I'm doing my duty and shoveling in some greenery, the last thing I need is a sharp fucking spike through the eye. Which is pretty much all you are, raw. A giant screaming sign reading "WAKE UP, STUPIDMOUTH! YOUR TONGUE IS TOO COMPLACENT! FEEL ALIVE NOW?!"  Which frankly, I really could do without.

Then there's all the layers. There's something deeply disturbing about your whorls - it's like we're eating skin or something. And what's the deal with that weird bulby bit on the inside? Is that the best part, or the thing we throw away? (I alternate). And I'm not fond of the way your top layer under the papery part is half paper and half food, and I have to either peel away the good stuff or eat the bad. It's wasteful and odd. And I'm kind of skeeved out at how you start sprouting green shit whenever I leave you in the bin too long, like you're some sort of miracle plant that doesn't need dirt or fertilizer or water or some guy in bib overalls to germinate, like normal vegetables do.  But those are quibbles, compared to the real issue: Why in holy living fuck do you fight back when we cut you? I mean, props for self-defense and all that, but you're already dead, for fuck's sake. There is no conceivable need for you to aim waves of acid into our eyes, forcing us to run blinded to the sink shouting curse words in front of our wide-eyed toddlers. There is NO need for these fuckers to have to exist:

Give in, onions. You're so much lower on the food chain than us, we actually put you on other foods. You can't win. So just put down your weapons and get in the Fryolator like nice little appetizers. 

Muuuuch better.

9/10. French onion soup is the shit.

Dear Lentils,

I get it.

You're nutritious and packed with protein. You cost like two bucks a silo. You keep forfucking ever. You're like Nature's Perfect Food, except for one, small, niggling detail: You taste like a road accident. Not a drive-by, minor-injuries, share insurance cards and get on our way accident either, but one of those haunting ones that lingers, like when a school bus with a drunken driver shoots over a median and into a hearse which stopped to let by a family of baby ducks. Such an awful, sad, waste which didn't have to happen if people would only have made better choices.

The color of sludge and the texture of recently moulted beetle casings, you lentils are nevertheless pushed on us regularly as a universal good, as if donuts and chocolate and macadamia nuts never existed. As if the only purpose food served was to nourish, with no regard for aesthetics or deliciousness at all. That's why all the great paintings since the dawn of time are streaky black squares of canvas that smell like poo and all great music was written for the kazoo and that thing where you wrap wax paper around a comb.*  I can guarantee you that whatever that goop was they were eating in the Matrix, it had a non-negative lentil quotient. But at least that crap was fictional.

You're in all sorts of stuff I like, so I eat you because you're too small to triage, but be aware: I still hate you.

1/10. The day it turns out you also cure cancer, I'll slit my wrists.

*yes! that was sarcasm! 

Okay, this is the part of our show where I admit that the whole pea thing eludes me. Nasty, green-tasting ball bearings of suck whose only redeeming feature seems to be how nicely your frozen cohort can serve as an ice pack. Then there are the offshoots (pun intended? Maybe. Do you really give a fuck?). Sugar snap peas, where the outsides are crunchy and the actual peas are dessicated nubbins that look disturbingly like what the oral surgeon does to your poor molars just before he slips the crowns on. Black-eyed peas, which are to the pea family what the boll weevil is to the beetle: that embarrassing Southern relative you hope you never cross paths with.

And then there are snow peas. Slimy, waxy packets of vaguely pea-shaped pulp, hiding inside salads like little chewy mantis wings that never go down right. Or wilting all over my Chinese food like tiny green Victorian women having the vapours. No crunch. No real flavor. No point but extra starch as a filler so the management can save on chicken costs. No thanks.

3/10. I will admit, you are the most visually attractive of all the podded legumes.