It turns out I love vegetables.

I am not sure how it is that I kind of thought I disliked vegetables as I was growing up. I mean, my mother isn't a gourmand, but she grew up like all the women in my family grew up cooking: not doing a huge variety of things, but doing a few good things spectacularly. (Mom's specialty: doing some pretty amazing things with wheat gluten, very often in stir fry.) And while I grew up in Toronto and Southern California, naturally family vegetable favorites were riffs on vegetables traditionally used in the Philippines. Sitaw, which are long green beans, kamote leaves, which are kind of like spinach, and the bittermelon ampalaya which is my sworn enemy. Mom also makes some good stuff with squash--I feel like it must have been kabocha, but she says she uses butternut squash most often.

I remember ADORING fiddleheads back in Canada. Fresh and cold from the fridge, doused with Italian dressing. Same for spinach, most of the time. I, like most kids, spurned brussel sprouts. I turned my nose up at coleslaw. And the asparagus I remember from when I was a kid was from a can, which is not its ideal form, I now know.

So anyway, since I moved to Indiana five and a half years ago, I discovered farmers' markets, and more specifically, the crazy weird delicious varieties of vegetables out in the world. And I decided to experiment. Since asparagus has such a short window of time, as you may remember, I'm just eating asparagus every night now. I've been using The Pioneer Woman Cooks recipe as my guide for that.

I gave up on buying broccoli, for the most part, from farmers' markets. Unless they're little baby individual heads of broccoli, I've discovered they're always infiltrated by green caterpillars. Now, I am not super concerned about dirt, but I CANNOT STAND CREEPY CRAWLIES. Cannot. Cannot. Cannot. (This is why I care very little about organic/pesticide-free stuff. KILL BUGS. But I want local and/or fair trade stuff, and they all get tied together, usually.) Anyway, the first time I found broccoli caterpillars, I opened my kitchen porch door (oh, how I miss my kitchen porch door now that I am in a third-story one-bedroom apartment) and threw the entire thing out into the grass. A sacrifice to our local bunnies. The second time, a friend was doing laundry downstairs and rushed up because he heard me shriek all the way from the basement. So, yeah. I gave up on farmers' market broccoli, but I buy it from the local co-op, and it is caterpillar-free. I use this recipe for broccoli roasted with almonds and doused in lemon and parmesan.

It was only a couple of months ago that I realized those are pretty much the exact same recipe, so I'm going to try applying the idea to other vegetables over the summer. Basically:

1. Preheat the oven to 425F degrees.
2. Chop your vegetables into relatively even-sized pieces.
3. Drizzle the vegetables in a neutral oil (I use grapeseed or olive oil, usually) and a splash of lemon or lime juice.
4. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. I use grinders: pink Himalaya salt and a lemon pepper mix. Eight twists of the grinder for each. Other options: almond slivers, pine nuts, parmesan-like cheese, minced garlic.
5. Toss the vegetable pieces so they're evenly coated. I use my hands, but you could be all fancy and use tools, I guess.
6. Spread the vegetables in a single layer on a sheet pan covered with foil or parchment paper.
7. Stick 'em in the oven for between 12 and 20 minutes. If you're not quite sure how long, I'd say set your timer at ten, and then poke a decent-size piece with a fork every four minutes or so after that, until it feels right.
8. Once they're done, transfer the veggies to a bowl (serving or otherwise). Sprinkle a bit more lemon or lime juice, and a handful of parmesan-like cheese, and toss.
9. Devour while the veggies are still hot, but not so hot that you'll scald your tongue. Not that, uh, I have done that.

I use parmesan, asiago, and romano pretty interchangeably, depending on what's on sale, but I do think this is way better if you've grated the cheese yourself, rather than using pre-grated stuff. Or shaved parmesan from your local grocery store's deli is also excellent. Steer away from the handy, but super-dry, Kraft bright green cardboard tubes, unless it's a cheese-shortage-emergency.

Enjoy!