Go directly to recipe collections
These days supermarkets and our neighbourhood greengrocer stock piles and piles of familiar and exotic fresh vegetables, in fact, the basic ingredients of all the world’s cuisines. We would so much like to try them all, but as a single cook who has undergone gastric or bariatric surgery and can only eat in small portions, our eyes might indeed be bigger than our tummies. Although we might buy those eggplants and bunches of kale with every intention of cooking them, we might not get the opportunity to do so before they’re only good for chucking in the compost. So, we need a way to try all those delicious vegetables without letting them go to waste. (For ideas for cooking with kale, see Things to do with Fresh Spinach.)
For our purposes, a Hero Vegetable is the sort of fresh vegetable that you like to have occasionally but not every day. (Though a few Crisper Essentials have made the list.)
When I do my weekly shopping, I limit myself to buying only one or two Hero Vegetables at a time, selecting those that can be purchased in small quantities, either because the vegetable itself is small, e.g. zucchini or sweet potato, or because my friendly supermarket or greengrocer kindly cuts them up and packages them for me. When it comes to cooking, I like to begin my evening’s extended dinner with an all-vegetable dish, particularly one featuring a Hero Vegetable.
If you go online, or browse through the vast range of recipe books and magazines on offer, you’ll find hundreds of recipes for your chosen Hero Vegetable. No doubt, you won’t want to limit yourself to the few recipes you’ll find here. However, you’ll find that I have chosen these recipes with a view to:
- Variety – by providing at least half a dozen different recipes for each Hero Vegetable.
- Simplicity – by ensuring the recipes are easy to make and don’t require exotic ingredients.
- Minimising cost and waste – by using a limited yet varied range of ingredients.
To this end, each recipe in this section focuses on one Hero Vegetable, accompanied largely by ingredients you’ll generally have on hand either as Pantry Essentials, Crisper Essentials, or Standby Vegetables.
You’ll find all the Hero Vegetable recipes in the entries listed below, or you could use ‘Search’ to find recipes for whatever ingredients you have on hand.
Recipe Collections: