Vegetables and Salads

Appears in

Published 1993

About

People who say they don’t like vegetables worry me. When there are so many different types to choose from, with so many different tastes and textures and so many possible ways of cooking them, how can they possibly know that they dislike all of them? As well as being endlessly versatile and delicious, vegetables are cheap, and they are of major importance to health (they are full of fibre and vitamins), so eat as many as you can, raw and cooked, every day.

The main principle to remember when cooking vegetables is never to overdo it. Mushy, overcooked vegetables lose so much of their flavour, and in some cases become rather unpleasant, so err on the side of undercooking rather than overcooking. If you are steaming, boiling or microwaving vegetables, stop the cooking when they are more or less al dente, that is just tender but still with a slight bite to them at the very centre.