Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	Everybody Here Wants You - Jeff Buckley
Entry tags:	cooking

Culinary experiments with veggies
A few weeks ago I signed up to have a box of locally-grown organic vegetables delivered to me each week. As expected, many of the vegetables I received were ones with which had no prior culinary experience. Faced with this situation, I looked up some simple recipes on the Internet and began to experiment.

The chard and kale tasted terrible raw so I boiled it, which made it rather bland. Fortunately, sprinkling a little grated parmesan cheese on it fixed that. I baked potatoes in their jackets, sliced them and sprinkled on some lime juice to create a delicious snack that keeps well in the fridge. I also baked some yams, although peeling them afterwards proved to be quite annoying, as it was for the beets, which I boiled. The taste of these snacks more than made up for the effort of peeling them though.

I had absolutely no idea what to do with the leeks until elizar told me I could discard the green part, then slice and sauté them. Sadly, leeks seem to make my eyes water in the same way that onions do so I was only able to get through half of them before I was reduced to a blubbering wreck and had to stop. Wanting to avoid frying my food in oil, I used my awesome Joyce Chen wok to fry the sliced leeks sans oil and threw in some mushrooms for good measure. Sprinkling a wee smidgen of chopped garlic onto the result made for a delightful first lunch.