Step No. 23 - Stage elaborate dramatic scenarios with your dinner veggies

One of the most horrifying threats levied against me when I was but a wee lad was, “You’ll eat your dinner now or you’ll have it for breakfast. If you don’t eat it at breakfast you’ll have it for lunch.” The thought of tough, bland slabs of meat; starchy, hardened mashed potatoes; and mushy broccoli made all the worse by the refrigerator’s chill was usually sufficient to scare me into finishing my dinner, however reluctantly. Breakfast for dinner = perpetual awesomeness; dinner for breakfast = perpetual misery. Imagine getting meatloaf burps at recess time on the playground.

Such lush greenery.
Broccoli as forest

I don’t remember being on the receiving end of that threat very often, as I was usually pretty quick to finish dinner anyway. It was only the odd time when Mom had to work an evening shift that Dad resorted to mashups (literally) of whatever food scraps had the misfortune of occupying the shady parts of the lower fridge shelves. These infamously awful mélanges of foods unknown were tough on everyone’s palette, even Dad. It was only then that I ever resisted… and also canned peas. I still hate canned peas.

I realise many of my contemporaries had similar issues and were often accused of playing with their food, usually vegetables. It didn’t help that most suburban housewives in the 1980s learned from their mothers how to cook vegetables, which is to say: bland, mushy, and with the colour nearly boiled out of them. The usual suspects: broccoli (always!), brussel sprouts, spinach, or fiddleheads (a wild fern and Maritime delicacy). All these veggies have in common the colour green. Super-tasters everywhere cringe at the thought of these bitter culprits and, to paraphrase Kermit the frog, “it ain’t easy eating green.”

To return to the topic of this post, how does one make the leap from dinner plate to (very far) off broadway? Don’t just futz around with the fork, let your imagination and materials inspire your gustatory impresario:

Broccoli looks like trees, so one may be tempted to enact the forest scenes from Robin Hood lore. Use lima beans or french fries as stand-ins for Robin Hood and Maid Marion. 

Think of broccoli as nuclear mushroom clouds in miniature photosynthetic terms. In lieu of broccoli, one can also use raw mushrooms; the thought of eating fungus is as ucky to me as radiation poisoning. In the atomic scenario, construct fallout bunkers of mashed potatoes to shelter your plate’s tender morsels of protein. Ooh! How about using boiled carrot cross sections as the ‘big, red nuclear armageddon button’ that’s always within reach of the American President’s thumb? Yeah, that would be cool.

"Take me to your feeder!"
Alien brain or small cabbage?

Getting into the greens, what does one do with spinach? Therein lies a perennial challenge. It’s not firm enough to stand in for anything concrete and ‘real world,’ but it is sufficient to use as some sort of sludge or slime. Recreate the Labrea tar pits and make your steamed tofu sink to the bottom like so many unwary explorers.

Brussel sprouts, if cooked improperly (which they usually are in most homes) closely resemble miniature alien brains in an instant allusion to 1950s Hollywood B-films like  ‘Attackers from Planet X’ or ‘Blood beast from beyond.’ One may also model a Frankenstein lookalike from mashed potatoes and transplant your brussel sprout brain there.

Fiddleheads. Well, all you inland kiddies can be grateful you were never exposed to this seasonal affliction. Fortunately for us salt water children, and unfortunately for the curly fern of our parental palettes’ pleasure, fiddlehead season is as fleeting as they are bitter and gritty. Most commonly boiled, buttered, and dashed liberally with vinegar, fiddleheads make the ideal candidate for theatrical representations of the octopus tentacles that threatened Captain Nemo’s Nautilus with certain death. The fiddlehead more closely resembles festered tendrils than anything fetched gleefully from the green-belt out behind the house.

"Yar, Captain. We de-tentacled that
pesky octopus. Yar."

I’ve noted above a few scenarios in which mashed potatoes play a significant role (stand-ins for humans, nuclear bunker, Frankenstein, etc.). The potato really is a category of theatrical device all its own. You will never find a more versatile vegetable. The mighty white tuber graces tables across the globe and is, to a large extent, the most prominent offender in showdowns between petulant children and desperate parents. It’s also a contentious side dish for the carb-phobic and those whose lower G.I. tract gives them no end of trouble after consuming our starchy friend. Verily, the sulfurous winds doth blow. Let the naysayers say their nay; the potato should be admired for its malleability and should be regarded, by and large, as the dinner plate’s answer to Meryl Streep.

Take heart, dear readers, my long suffering peers now control the contents of their dinner plate and, in some cases, the contents of their children’s dinner plates. Yes, we can play with our veggies no matter the stern looks or verbal rebuke; Yes, we can present our children with pre-sculpted theatrical veggies; Yes, we can eat write, produce, and direct our veggies on our own terms!