"Fresh Vegetable Medley"

[Hest88]

I can tell you that you ought to wake up each day and thank the deity of your choice for really well made vegetables ... and may you never see what the alternative is .....

Hee, hee, oh I do. I know I'm completely spoiled. My husband still talks about how much complaining I did in suburban NY everytime I encountered the sub-par bread at the local Italian restaurants and I refused to buy the supermarket berries that were shipped from, gasp, California. It's incredible he still married me!

[Gifted Gourmet]

These sentiments are relatively the same for anyone in the Bay area ... it is really shocking for me to go to the open air markets in the towns of your area and the central coast and see the incredible quantity and quality of the produce there ... I live on the opposite coast and see nothing comparable here really ..

The way in which Alice Waters (and others of that calling) taught us to truly appreciate and value the area farms, has added enormously to our expectations of what properly made vegetables can actually be ...

[bloviatrix]

Oh, I didn't mean that vegetables weren't served, I meant that in my experience they have tended to be badly prepared, clearly an afterthought, a nutritional sop that was not really intended to actually taste good, but was there merely to apease the nutrition police.

I think a part of it was that vegetables were always boiled. Then, in the 70s it was "cutting edge" to steam them. Our mothers (or whomever cooked) never considered using using alternate forms of heat - roasting comes to mind here. Using an egullet favorite - cauliflower, look at how roasting brings it to a whole new level.

As a kid, I probably would have enjoyed eating my vegies a lot more if mom had known about roasting.

[snowangel]

In small northern MN diners, "fresh vegetable medley" is inevitably frozen peas and carrot cubes, sometimes with some frozen broccoli stems tossed in for good measure. Spongey, to say the least. Oh, I almost forgot, sometimes some frozen corn! Worst is when one gets it in August, when sweet corn and fresh tomatoes are at their prime.

[Cusina]

In small northern MN diners, "fresh vegetable medley" is inevitably frozen peas and carrot cubes, sometimes with some frozen broccoli stems tossed in for good measure. Spongey, to say the least. Oh, I almost forgot, sometimes some frozen corn! Worst is when one gets it in August, when sweet corn and fresh tomatoes are at their prime.

Yup, here too. Ugh. Never order anything even vaugely vegetable in a small Midwestern diner. You'll end up with wilty brown iceberg and squishy-defrosty veggie chunks every time. Much better off with the fruit plate. Those are harder to mess up. Or better yet just get the fried plate special.

This whole thread is making me think of the Outback Steakhouse. They do a reasonably fresh vegetable medley (broccoli, carrots, zucchini and yellow squash), if there is such a thing. But then they completely ruin it by "seasoning" it to death. ugh. So close, and yet still terrible.

[sml311]

This whole thread is making me think of the Outback Steakhouse. They do a reasonably fresh vegetable medley (broccoli, carrots, zucchini and yellow squash), if there is such a thing. But then they completely ruin it by "seasoning" it to death. ugh. So close, and yet still terrible.

Everytime I've had it, it's been massively overcooked and bland...hmmmm...Maybe different places of a chain are different?

SML