We certainly have an appetite for vegetables and can’t imagine meals without them. Often they make the meal. It wasn’t always so. Like many kids facing a dinner plate of meat and two or three cooked (typically boiled) veg, we also struggled with the usual suspects – cabbage and cauliflower – along with (in our case) beans, pumpkin, carrots and peas.

It’s hard to imagine a dinner time when the spotlight wasn’t on ‘eat your vegetables’. But it wasn’t all that long ago, in fact a bit over 100 years. The discovery of vitamins and minerals in the early years of the twentieth century was the wakeup call, and ‘Dr Vitamin’ (aka Elmer Verner McCollum, 1879–1967) was the key player in making sure vegetables made up a bigger part of the dinner plate. He claimed they were ‘protective foods’ because ‘they were so constituted to make good the deficiencies of whatever else we liked to eat’.

But, it’s not just the leafy ones that matter. It’s all of them, because, as Harvard’s Professor Walter Willett says, ‘so far, no one has found a magic bullet that works against heart disease, cancer and a host of other chronic diseases as well as fruits and vegetables seem to do’.

Today, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to vegetables. The produce aisles are overflowing. This is perhaps because ‘vegetable’ is a culinary, not a botanical term. We can take our pick from fruits such as avocado, cucumber, marrow, tomato, capsicum (peppers) and green beans; bulbs such as onion and globe artichoke; stalks such as celery and asparagus; flower stalks and buds such as broccoli and cauliflower; roots and tubers such as carrot, potato and sweet potato; as well as the proverbial leafy greens, including spinach, lettuce and cabbage.

And there’s more. We have an array of edible dried seeds from the legume family: beans, peas and lentils. In this book, we have given legumes a chapter of their own because they are also rich sources of protein and play a key role in vegetarian and vegan diets.

We aren’t going to tell you to eat your veggies, but we hope that with our recipes you’ll find them hard to resist and pile your plate high.

HOW MUCH VEG?

Dietary guidelines around the world recommend we have around five serves, or 2–3 cups, of vegetables (including legumes) a day depending on our age and life stage. Here’s what the serving size they are talking about looks like:

Note: For people with diabetes, serve sizes of starchy veg and legumes are based on equivalent carbohydrate amounts to help them manage their blood glucose levels. They are:

COOKING: THE GAME CHANGER

Ever tried to munch a raw potato and ended up with a sore stomach? Starchy roots and tubers tend to be difficult for us to digest raw because their energy reserves (the starch) are stored in hard, compact granules that our digestive system can’t process without help. Cooking provides that help. During cooking, water (either in the food itself, or in more recent times, from the pot) and heat expand these compact granules. Some of the granules burst and release individual starch molecules, allowing the starch-digesting enzymes in our mouths and the small intestine to get on with the job, because they now have a greater surface area to attack. (Here, we explain more about the ins and outs of carbohydrate digestion.)

‘There is no way that taking a pill can replace eating fruits and vegetables … In theory, one could cram all the good things that plants make – essential elements, fibre, vitamins, antioxidants, plant hormones, and so on – into a pill. But it would have to be a very large pill, and no one can honestly say what should go into such a pill. Or in what proportions. Health issues aside, the biggest drawback is that a pill would always taste like a pill. It can’t give you the earthy smell and taste of a fresh ear of corn, the sweetness of a juicy tomato still warm from the afternoon sun, the crunch of an apple, the festive green of a snap pea or broccoli floret, or the smooth nutty taste of an avocado.’

PROF. WALTER WILLETT

Eat, Drink and Be Healthy

In her foreword, Prof. Jennie Brand-Miller reminds us not only of the importance of carbs in human evolution but how cooking starchy foods such as tubers was central to the dietary change that triggered and sustained the growth of the human brain. In fact, says primatologist Prof. Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, ‘it’s hard to imagine the leap to Homo erectus without cooking’s nutritional benefits’. He believes we have been cooking for a long time. About 1.8 million years ago our teeth and our gut became small, a change that can only be explained, he says, by our ancestors getting softer foods and more nutrition, and ‘this could only have happened because they were cooking. It’s what made our human diet “human” and is the most logical explanation for our advances in brain and body size over our ape ancestors.’

It appears that our ancestors were roasting. And not just the meat the men hauled back to camp. The roots and tubers the women and children gathered over the day were thrown on the fire to soften up, too. They probably also discovered that roasting does a lot more than cook food. It transforms it.

There’s nothing like roast veg. Dry oven heat caramelises any natural sugars on the surface, evaporating some of the water and concentrating the flavour.

THE ART OF ROASTING VEG

Here are our five tips for roast veg, crisp on the outside, hot and steamy on the inside and with a deep, delicious sweetness:

  • Cut starchy vegetables (potatoes and sweet potato) into chunks or long flat pieces about the same size to ensure even cooking. Roast for about 15 minutes before adding the quicker-roasting veggies, such as carrots and parsnips, which can be left whole (if small) or sliced lengthways.
  • Make sure your vegetables are dry before roasting – this will make them crisp.
  • Lightly brush the vegetables with a thin layer of oil, which will help them brown faster and more evenly.
  • Arrange vegetables in a single layer in a sturdy roasting pan. They need good airflow while they roast, so don’t cram them together as overcrowding can result in soggy veg.
  • Lightly season with salt and freshly ground pepper along with whatever other flavourings you fancy (unpeeled garlic cloves, thyme, rosemary, orange zest, ground cumin or fennel seeds).

GROWING

The vegetable garden is the perfect place to learn how to taste and not merely eat food. For Kate, who comes from a farming background, a veggie patch has always been a part of life wherever she has lived. She remembers a childhood when wise old hands would tug a baby carrot from the soil, pluck a sun-warm tomato, or snap off a crisp green bean and give them to her so she could experience the beauty and energy of the earth.

Anyone with a vegetable plot or herb pot will agree that there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of making things grow: pride in achievement; delight in that ripe tomato or bunch of basil, and pleasure in popping out to pick what you need for the evening meal. You can also save on trips to the produce store, enjoy the outdoors and discover the joys of composting, worm farming and dealing with pests and diseases in an environmentally friendly way. People with green fingers make it look easy, but growing your own produce has its challenges. If you are a newcomer, ask for tips, start small, do your homework and plant vegetables and herbs that practically grow themselves.

BURIED TREASURE

The fleshy underground parts of a plant (roots and modified plant stems) are where carbohydrate energy a plant needs to grow is stored. We tend to label them root veggies or starchy carbs. But not all are roots and only a few, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes taro and yams, are really starchy.

UNDERGROUND EDIBLESPOPULAR ‘ROOT’ VEGGIES
TRUE ROOTS Taproots – the main root Beetroot (beets), carrots, celeriac, parsnips, radishes, turnips
Tuberous roots – lateral or secondary ‘storage’ roots Sweet potatoes
MODIFIED PLANT STEMS Rhizomes – fleshy, spreading underground stems Arrowroot, galangal, ginger, licorice, turmeric, wasabi
Corms – short, swollen underground or underwater stems Taro, water chestnuts
Tubers – swollen underground storage ‘stems’ that can vary considerably in size Jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, yams