Fuck You, Broccoli

Collard Greens - the definitive recipe

• 1 bunch collard greens
  
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups milk chocolate chips
• 1 beer
  

Preheat oven to 375° F.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a separate mixing bowl, mix butter, granulated sugar, vanilla extract and brown sugar until creamy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually add in flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Throw collard greens into trash.

Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets and bake until golden brown. Drink beer while you wait.

0/10. Fuck collard greens.

image via wikipedia

Sprouts: The Devil’s Pubes

Sprouts, I don’t know how to break this to you, but you are a nasty excuse for a vegetable. You’re basically what we get when beans go bad, and when you factor in that beans are never good to begin with, that’s a lot of low to limbo under. I imagine it’s pretty difficult to simultaneously comprise no taste and all aftertaste, but somehow you manage it. Worse yet, you have this irritating way of tickling my sensitive mouth-bits like bad dental floss during a particularly bad hangover.

And what the hell are those little penisy protuberances at your tips? If you were any bigger, that shit would be cut right the hell off the same way we circumcize string beans, but somehow you gets a pass because who has that kind of time.

I’m also especially annoyed at the way you insinuate yourself into otherwise delicious soups, disguised as noodles. Noodles that crunch. And trust me when I say that the human psyche is not really qualified to deal with foods that crunch when they’re not supposed to. If bite into something that I think should be soft (pasta, banana slice, meatloaf) and it resists against my teeth with any sort of sound effect, trust me I’m gonna freak out because assuming nothing’s burned, only one thing crunches when it’s inside soft foods, and that’s exoskeleton. Or, well, skeleton, but that’s just too gross to contemplate.  As are you.

1/10. Also because you’re called Mung beans, and I ain’t eating that.

image via wikipedia

Kohlrabi. More proof that unpronouncable = inedible

Quick: What do you get when you cross a cabbage with a radish? 

Diarrhea!!!

Hahahaha, okay, actually the answer I was going for was kohlrabi, but I can see how the punchline is pretty applicable. Kohlrabi, it’s truly astounding how you managed to combine all the wilty limp dickishness of cabbage with all the bitter exhaust of radishes. Plus you look just like one of those not-really-scary alien things that killed all of the unnamed red-shirted Starfleet crew members back in the day. I swear I killed you multiple times playing Space Invaders. So what the fuck are you doing back on my plate?

Seriously, can you spot the difference?

Kohlrabi, you’re up there with bok choy and daikon radishes and jicama - foods that didn’t exist when I was a kid and frankly shouldn’t now. New doesn’t mean better. And no one exemplifies this better than kohlrabi. You taste like Skrillex sounds: painful, unmistakeable, and with occasional screaming in the background.

2/10. Go back to your home planet. We don’t like your kind around here.

An open letter to the Person Who Invented Wheatgrass Juice:

Dear P.W.I.W.J.,

Wheatgrass is grass. It tastes like GRASS.

What, are you stupid?

Sincerely,

Everyone with a brain (or a tongue)

Iceberg Lettuce - the bland eating the bland

Bergie, I’d like to take a moment aside, and talk about a little TV sitcom called “Coach.”  It starred Craig T. Nelson as the head coach of the Minnesota State Screaming Eagles. Here’s a little taste of the opening credits, for you young ‘uns out there. Now I never saw “Coach.” I only know all this info from reading wikipedia. None of my friends ever watched it, either. No one ever talked about it at the ole proverbial water cooler. When I went looking for ostensibly rip-roarin clips on YouTube to share here, all I came up with was that opening theme. Which (let’s face it) - if that’s representative, no wonder it’s forgotten. And yet, every year, there it was in the prime time lineup, back when being there Meant Something. “Coach” ran for nine consecutive seasons on ABC, from 1989 through 1997, and never once cracked the top ten list of most-watched shows.

That’s a lot of years of meh.

Clearly, someone was enjoying it, or at least unable to look away.

Iceberg lettuce, you are the “Coach” of the veggie prime time lineup. No one is passionate about you. No one serious or intellectual will even acknowledge you exist. Foodies look at you the way floral designers look at carnations - too lowly to tolerate, even as kitsch. The official leaf of the truly petty bourgeois. And yet, you are quite possibly the best selling vegetable in U.S. history. You’re smooshed between “special sauce” and “cheese” in the Big Mac, you’re filling up space in everything from tacos to tuna casserole, you’re the first thing most people grab if they have to make salad throughout flyover country.  And why? Because you’re so innocuous? Because you have the same flavor profile as Cincinnati air? Because you cost less than the bread so what the hell, add some green shit?

I don’t get it. You wilt under the slightest heat and turn brown the second someone cuts you with anything sharper than a fingernail. I don’t know what you’re doing in half the foods you’re in - you’re basically the green stuff people scoop out of everything before they take the second bite. So what’s the popularity? I am genuinely stymied here.

Then again, I never got “Coach,” either.

4/10. You’re hard to hate, when there’s so little there there. But impossible to like nonetheless.

p.s. also fuck you for the Titanic.

image via wikipedia

Celery, a.k.a. Rabbit Floss

Celery, you are one polarizing bitch. You’re bitter, you’re stringy, you wilt under the slightest bit of heat, you get stuck in people’s teeth, and have an aftertaste that can crumble sheetrock. Plus you last juuuuust long enough in the fridge that people stock up on you planning to eat or cook with you later, then come up with a better idea Every Single Time until you end up a bag of liquefying green goo in the back of the veggie drawer. Then the next time we go to the store, we go and buy more celery. Seriously, half the people reading this right now are making nervous giggling noises because they know that somewhere in the back of their fridge is a bag filled with your eldritch unspeakable horror, decaying as we speak. A bag that says “Foxy” on it.

And yet, and yet… show me a crudité platter without you. Show me a delicious soup recipe you’re not in (shut up, gaspacho). Show me another vegetable that goes with peanut butter AND raisins, AND is called “ants on a log.” That’s just fucking genius.

You just try doing that with a rutabaga.

7/10. I hate ya, but I love ya.

Celery image via wikipedia /Popolon. Ants on a log via fiestafarms.ca

You say Okra, I say pustulent slime pods

Well, I’ve been doing this for weeks now and we’ve finally reached the nadir. Pardon me if I feel the need to “go medieval” on this next vegetable’s “ass”.

Okra, you foul, putrid excrescence. Born from slime and glaucous goo and only edible by the definition of the word which means “non-toxic.” You boast the color of nuclear waste and the flavor of raw sewage. You seep slime from your pores and befoul the earth with your stink. Cooking you would be an insult to my cheap-ass Farberware from Target. Shitting you would be redundant.

The only good thing I have to say about you is that there was a great fake commercial for Okra Cola with Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live when I was growing up, but I can’t even link to it since it’s not on fucking Hulu. When you’re too despicable for the internet, baby, you’ve hit bottom.

-∞/10. It just doesn’t get any lower.

image via wikipedia

Bok Choy: A Haiku

When I was seven

You did not even exist.

Life was better then.

Okay, I know that bok choy is actually from China and haiku is of the Japanese persuasion, so technically this is inappropriate or cultural imperialism or something, but it’s all good because fuck you, Bok Choy. You know why. 1/10.

image via wikipedia

Parsnips - the root of all evil

Parsnips, I hope I have your attention: I know what you’re up to. The bastard stepchild of the unholy alliance between carrots and potatoes, you managed to get shafted with only the worst characteristics of both. Corpse-colored and tasteless, impossible to eat without cooking, impossible to cook without turning to mealy mush, impossible to eat without regret. At best you look like an albino carrot, at worst you’re straight out of a Middle-Earth sexual aid catalog. You’re a deviant motherfucker, and frankly I’m uncomfortable just being in the same supermarket as you.