I've been very interested in the food industry, and I think the reason for this is multi-faceted.

First, a lot of English-speaking countries place lower importance on veggies. We got calcium from milk and cheese, so we didn't need to learn how to cook well with lots of dark leafy greens, as an example.

Second, European meals tend to focus heavily on a main and some side dishes, but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal. You're not trying to think of ways to cook squash, because the dinner is squash.

Finally (there are more, but I don't want to get too crazy in the comments), European cooking tends to focus more on using a wide variety of ingredients. In contrast, you'll find a lot of SE Asian cooking uses many of the same ingredients, but they prepare the food in vastly different ways, leading to some completely different dishes. This means that they naturally have a huge repertoire of ways to modify their veggies to fit any meal.

I have no real point, I just never get to talk about this stuff and I find it really interesting. If I was wrong about anything, please correct me below.

>"focus heavily on a main and some side dishes"

Because traditionally they were served "courses". However, it's all biryani in the belly. I think the old ways of serving a main with sides is still a tip to that era when it was plated separately. I'm ok with having it all mixed together so long as the flavors complement. I don't want a steak, cubed, mixed with my veggies and mashed potatoes, all in a bowl. Some things should be separate, some things are ok being together/combined. Western style cooking has been dominated by French Cuisine and traditional Countryside cooking. Only within the last 30-50 years have they started branching out into Asian or South American dishes.

Its way more approachable today than it ever has been with YouTube videos, online blog recipes, availability of supplies.

>I'm ok with having it all mixed together so long as the flavors complement. I don't want a steak, cubed, mixed with my veggies and mashed potatoes, all in a bowl.

Huh? They don't complement??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd%27s_pie

You win the prize for readership. Yes, shepherds pie was exactly what I was referring to. You can keep your meat pie.

On the green leafy veggies - my mom cooks like 7/8 different varieties in as many different way. Each green tastes different and they’re cooked differently. The closest equivalent to spinach for example is steamed and made into a soup. I could just eat rice and that - even as a kid. There’s one that’s bitter and it’s cooked with a lentil. It actually tastes good. Another one that’s sour and is added to a spicy curry. And so on. (But afaik none of these are available any more)

> a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal. You're not trying to think of ways to cook squash, because the dinner is squash.

But even if the dinner is squash, you still want to think of different ways to prepare it, don't you?

This is how I, in the US, was fed while growing, and is how I do things to this day. I didn't realize that there was a cultural variation on this (or that my habit wasn't the common case in my own culture!)

Today I learned...

I don’t have anything to add right now, but I found this to be very insightful and not at all too crazy. Thanks for posting.

> but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal

Can you provide some examples? I can't think of any.

It's not Latin/South American, it's not European, it's not Chinese, it's not Japanese, it's not like anywhere I've been in Africa, and it doesn't match my knowledge of India or the Middle East.

Nor can I imagine any country where "dinner is squash" makes much sense. Squash has almost no calories, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to center a meal on.

Cuisines often have occasional meals that are complete enough to be eaten as a single dish -- some kind of protein-mixed-in-with-carbs like lasagna or paella or chicken stroganoff. But these seem to be exceptions in the cuisine, rather than the rule.

Could you elaborate with some specific countries where the one-dish pattern is the norm?

Not parent, but as an example zucchini boats are pretty popular in my area of the Midwest as are stuffed peppers.

A zucchini boat is basically just zucchini stuffed with meat, cheese, tomato, onions, and spices. That's the whole meal. Stuffed peppers is basically the same thing, but with peppers instead of zucchini.

Oh for sure. I guess I think of both of those as being ground beef dishes rather than zucchini/pepper dishes. They're kind of like hamburgers but swapping out the bun for a vegetable. Maybe it depends on your ratios?

Is the "center of the meal" the part that provides the most volume and mass, or is it the part with the most calories? My lunch today was a full pound of bok choy (raw weight), 2 Tbsp avocado oil, 4 oz of steak, and 1 oz of cheese. kulahan and bigtunacan might say bok choy was my meal, but consistent with your observation, it provided only 9% of the calorie content.

I could see that. We change the fillings to get more variety. One time it might be ground beef, next time chorizo or ground turkey.

I grew up on Lebanese food. While in a restaurant you may have many side dishes, at home it was more usual to have one dish. That said, going to a less fancy restaurant, it wouldn't be weird to grab a plate with nothing else, like at home.

Some examples of things we'd eat as the entire meal:

* Fatteh/tisi'yeh, a dish made with a layer of bread, then boiled chickpeas, then yoghurt, and topped with some toasted pine nuts, melted ghee, paprika. Sometimes in a restaurant, this is part of a larger spread of food.

* Any variety of kebbeh (there are many). We'd eat this with bread. In a restaurant, kebbeh would not be the singular dish.

* Various things referred "tabakh" (lit. cooking lol) which we'd usually eat with rice or burghal (crushed wheat) cooked with vermicelli noodles. You can then say that's multiple dishes, but it's kind of like bread. Examples: bazala (peas, carrots, maybe potatoes, coriander in a tomato sauce) on rice, fasulya (white beans in a tomato sauce) on rice or burghal, al-asiyeh (potatoes, carrots, corriander stew) on burghal, spanegh (spinach, minced meat, pine nuts) with rice, and many others. Most of this is sometimes cooked with diced lamb of shredded chicken.

* Lahm bi ajeen (minced meat cooked with onions and molasses on dough with pinenuts) would be sufficient a meal, sometimes perhaps with a quick salad. Not a complete meal in a restaurant typically.

* We were more than happy to throw diced lamb (skewered with some onions), kafta, or chicken on the barbecue and eat with bread, maybe a garlic dip for chicken, occasionally with a salad, occasionally throwing some potatoes or similar vegetables on the barbecue. In a restaurant, a barbecue dish would have many sides.

* We'd pan fry some diced lamb in ghee, drizzle some pomegranate molasses and eat with bread.

* Pan fried potatoes with eggs on top, eaten with bread.

* Pasta cooked in yoghurt + coriander and garlic.

* A leafy green like spinach called sili', not sure what it is in english, cooked with black eye beans, then a squeeze of lemon and eaten with bread.

* Foule which is just fava beans stewed, we'd eat with bread. Squeeze of lemon. Maybe some pickles, olives, tomato, and cucumber on the side. In a restaurant, this'd probably be part of a wider breakfast spread.

All this is to say, it was normal to serve food from a single pot or tray and eat with utensils or bread, or from two pots placing rice/burghal on the plate then scooping the "tabakh" on top.

For us bread is very normal throughout the day, it is thin, we'd rip off a bit to grab food, not very heavy. Modern bakeries make bread looking like https://www.yum.com.au/d-lebanese-bread-bag-x-6.html

All said, my parents grew up poor, so that background could reflect our norms. (edit) We also did not grow up around much family, so large gatherings were uncommon for us, which differs from typical Lebanese culture.

All those look very familiar to me. There been a Lebanese community in my small Canadian city for years some as far back as 1900 others from 1970s, 1908s depending on what cause them to come here.

I knew a couple from south Lebanon "Si and Sue" Haddad. Si would make me cardamom flavoured coffee and some baklava. Sue made the food eggplant always seemed to be on the go.

Very friendly and a very wide range of food, a great culture to grow up in.

>depending on what cause them to come here

There was literally a 15-year long civil war in Lebanon from mid-70s till 1990

If you go to Ethiopia, for instance, it's very common to have one dish that everyone eats from. Also common in the Middle East. You'll see it in some Chinese communities, but it tends to be more rural - once a nation develops and they enter a more globalized market, this tendency seems to fall off.

To be clear, I didn't mean that it was literally a single dish, I meant that instead of trying to compliment your meal properly with a matching veggie, because you're only making one thing. As long as it all makes sense together in the bowl/plate/hand, it works.

> First, a lot of English-speaking countries place lower importance on veggies.

Which ones? In the US, we are told to eat our veggies because they are good for you. The problem in the US is that something forced women into the workplace and families are resorting to easy processed meals like microwave dinners, fast food, etc.

Conversely I found it way easier to eat "healthy" in the US due to the popularity of flash frozen vegetables.

In college I would buy a bag of pre-cut flash frozen vegetables suitable for a stir fry and just dump that into the wok and throw some sauce & protein.

Abroad where people eat fresh vegetables I had the habbit of ordering food delivery everyday because I'm not going to waste 1 hour of my life every day washing & cutting vegetables and the knife and the cutting board etc.

I'd like to provide a counterargument to:

> Second, European meals tend to focus heavily on a main and some side dishes, but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal.

A ton of German cuisine, especially historically is either Soup or "Eintopf" (literally one-pot). You might add bread, but the dish stands by itself. Especially in the winter time, this is something people still do a lot. Still looking forward to kale (Grühnkohl, or where I'm from: Braunkohl). I still love stuff like Schmohrkohl and Grühnkohl. Not so much the carrot and potato soup and things like that.

PS: I'd consider "Auflauf" (casserole?) to be a one-pot dish as well.

What's your source for this? European countries are quite different from each other, and I'm wondering if your experience was only in restaurants while travelling (which is a very different experience to what most people eat every day at home).

Squash & Zucchini are amazing in so many recipes. Want a quick curry? Squash + veggies + spices & rice. Want to thicken up a big soup? Add zucchini and let it cook down into nothing but added flavor and thickness.

And if you want to go another route, you can make any vegetable into wine.

I blame cheap carbs and lack of education around cooking; we need to bring back Home Economics classes and teach the new generation.

Noodles made from zucchini are delicious. Highly recommend.

Zucchini is great but it's kind of hard to eat 1 zucchini a day for 4 months straight (the consequence of growing a single plant).

If you're just eating it sure, but throwing it into some chili, or stew you'll hardly notice it.

Or chocolate cake

1 zucchini is nothing. It shrinks a lot when fried for a while.

No kidding. They are 95% water. (Actual figure.)

Then eat the blossoms before they turn into actual zucchinis. Mexicans have enough recipes to keep you busy for 4 months straight.

Flor de Calabaza (zucchini flower) quesadillas are so underrated.

https://www.maricruzavalos.com/quesadillas-de-flor-de-calaba...

You're so right about home gardens creating these brief windows of abundance, and then nothing.

Getting into gardening helped me understand how big of a role fermentation, drying, and canning played in our lived up until the spread of refrigeration.

Also, for stuff like lettuce, you can plant several series of seeds a week or two apart to get a "conveyor belt" of product instead of a bit glut if your season is long enough- but it is a lot of effort.

Different cultivars that grow and yield at different rates can help some too.

My favorite preservation item is dill pickled green beans. They keep their snap, and are DELICIOUS. Let's not think too much about the sodium content.

A little planning can help with this.

If you do your own starts, you can do what I do with peppers:

* overwinter a few plants in containers, they'll be ready quickly when you put htem back out just after last freeze.

* start some plants in mid jan, some in mid feb, and some in mid march, to fewer are ready at various times. Of course peppers will produce fruits over an extended period.

Tomatoes are similar, and you can also use vining varietals that produce fewer tomatoes continuously (rather than all at once).

For a lot of leafy plants (spinach, leaf lettuces) i plant them in with my bigger plants - they'll be done by the time the other plants are big enough to crowd/shade them out.

A lot of plants come out in mid to late summer. If your climate allows it, you can plant brassicas (like broccoli) when you pull those out an they'll thrive in the cool fall weather.

As another commenter mentioned, various cultivars can have different timings.

All of this is a little bit of extra work in the garden, and quite a bit more planning (but I like that part, and after a bit of practice it's not that much effort either, I'll do it over a few evenings in January. It helps to have other gardening friends over for dinner and garden planning/seed buying - more fun and less like work). The result is an extended period of available produce without as much of a "glut" at peak.

It annoys me to no end that a lot of garden plants are still designed around the home garden being a mini-farm rather than a continuing source of fresh produce. This made a lot more sense 100 years ago, but these days it seems counter-productive, most people don't grow gardens to preserve food over the winter, but rather to have fresh veggies while enjoying gardening (and maybe to cut out the produce bill in the summer)

Or, you can grow tomatoes, watch birds peck a single @#$%^@#$%^@$%^& bite out of each @#$^@#$%^$%^& one, despite any netting, fencing or anything else short of an enclosed green house, throw your hands up in disgust and never touch dirt again.

It's not for everyone, but it certainly worked in my case. ;)

My mom uses unmatched socks to protect her figs from the infernal starlings.

You wouldn't want the one with a bite out of it either?

My version was 40 broccoli vs thousands of slugs. Apparently they smell it from as far as they can travel in a life time.

Beer is the best slug killer. A little in the bottom of a plastic dish, and they'll drink themselves to death.

It saved our broccoli and cabbage.

yeah, I dug in cups that would fill up with slugs then the new slugs would eat the old ones. One or two would eat some broccoli per day until they all looked inedible.

4-5 bottles of beer per day could buy a lot of broccoli. It didn't add up.

That's fair. A relative left a 12 pack of stag at my house, so I used that gross stuff. I was less concerned about price that way.

With slugs, at least you can stomp a few of them into paste and gain a pyrrhic victory. Birds? You're the old man and his son in that Simpsons episode shaking your fist at the sky, upset because you can't shake harder.

That being said, 1000s of slugs is practically insurmountable unless you plan to salt the Earth (figurately and literally) or kill the entire neighborhood with fire. Both have...consequences beyond the initial issue. ;)

Besides the ones drowned in beer I collected about half a bucket every morning.

The solution would be for everyone in the neighborhood to grow food and get rid of their car so that the hedgehog population can grow to match the food supply.

This is me with an apple tree and worms. I just accepted that there will be at least one worm/bee/parasite in each apple, so I eat around it and throw the remainder to the horses.

Who doesn't like squash? It's like the meat of vegetables.

All those are fine vegetables. I especially love squash. Can make soups, curries, and pie with it.

Ferment them to give them richer flavour, improve their digestibility, and to extend their shelf life.

There are lots of resources available on lacto-fermentation, but basically you need some clean jars, salt, and clean water, plus some spices. Fermented vegetables do not spoil for many months, and are great soup bases for cream soups.

Seriously? Who doesn't like spinach and zucchini??? Spinach is really good wilted in a pan of olive oil that's been infused with garlic and red pepper flakes.

Zucchini is great steamed with yellow squash and vidalia onions and seasoned with fresh pepper.

I love zucchini, and one of my kids enjoys it, but my wife and other kid quite dislike it. The texture, apparently regardless of how it’s prepared, is the issue for them more than the taste. I’ve tried firmer (grilled) and softer (steamed) preparations but have received the same feedback, so it’s something innate to the fruit. To each their own.

Have you tried zucchini "spaghetti" salad?

Basically there are these cutters which cut the zucchini (raw) into very long "noodles". I think they are sometimes called "zoodles".

With these "noodles" you can do anything you like. But I've only tried it as a salad. i.e. add oil, salt, pepper and whatever you like, mix it, and enjoy.

Great idea. I haven’t, but I’ll give it a shot. The real trick may be convincing the kid that it’s not zucchini.

Make sure you're salting them to draw out the bitterness of the zucchini. You can blanch them for a few minutes then throw them in an ice bath, or sprinkle salt on them about half an hour ahead of time then rinse them off after. Either way, pat them dry and your zucchini should be much tastier.

Could it the linked to the age of the plant? When my dad allows the zucchini to grow too long, it’s bitter. At 20 cm it’s much sweeter, and we can easily eat it raw/blanched.

In my and my partner's experience courgette is only bearable when you make it unhealthy (drown it in oil and salt). At that point why bother: everything tastes good roasted with oil.

Oil isn't necessarily unhealthy.

I just discovered some parisian carrots in my garden months after my last harvest!! Hardy little guys.

I don't disagree, but "too much" isn't really a thing. The trick there is understanding long duration storage preparation options. Zucchini for example can be incorporated into an excellent relish, tomatoes into a number of sauces, carrots and onions and leeks into soups. All of these things you can 'can' (put up on the shelf through the process of canning) and they will continue to be tasty for months, even years later.

> Zucchini/courgette, squash, spinach I have piles of it but people don't want it not even friends and family.

I used to hate zucchini. But then I started eating lower carb and found ways to enjoy it. A few simple tips made a big difference:

* Add lots of sodium. Not necessarily pure table salt; fish sauce or Better than Bouillon are really nice. These vegetables have very very little salt on their own. The mainstream public health advice still seems to be that Americans eat too much salt, but (a) I probably was eating less than most, and (b) the advice may be wrong for most people, and (c) it may be particularly wrong when eating low-carb. <https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto/supplements#sodium> has a nice section about this with references.

* Sautée chopped veggies (zucchini, eggplant, cabbage, whatever), again with sodium. Then make it into a shakshuka-esque dish (add canned tomato, spices, and egg then broil; maybe also cheese or canned fish) or add in some ground meat/sausage + cheese + spices + low-sugar ketchup + mustard. I use my cast iron skillet a lot now.

* Spiralize; use as pasta noodles with a thick sauce.

I eat lots of dark leafy greens too. I often steam them in a Pyrex in the microwave then enclose in cheesecloth and squeeze the water out with tongs. Salt and pepper, throw into almost any savory dish, use as a base for a modified juevos rancheros, etc.

>I eat lots of dark leafy greens too. I often steam them in a Pyrex in the microwave then enclose in cheesecloth and squeeze the water out with tongs

Takes longer to prepare but if you bake them in the oven you'll get a similar result but won't lose all those nutrients in the water

Side note - you really are a maverick kind of cook lol

> Takes longer to prepare but if you bake them in the oven you'll get a similar result but won't lose all those nutrients in the water

Interesting point! I wonder how much I am losing.

> Side note - you really are a maverick kind of cook lol

I choose to take that as a compliment. :-)

Fish sauce? Unless it is a regular part of your diet, most people won't like it. The smell is incredibly off-putting. And, the reason you like it probably isn't the salt. It is the umami (savoriness) from the naturally occurring MSG. Japanese miso and soy sauce can do similar things to bland veggies.

My point is that the salt doesn't have to be just salt. Folks who don't like fish sauce can find something that works for them.

Yes, I like miso and soy sauce too. Salt + umami = yum. But the salt is the vital part for low carb eaters like me. The "keto flu" is no joke. I'm not even a keto person (not that strict) but I've had weakness, headaches, cramps, and heart palpitations when I had insufficient electrolytes. I don't want to repeat that!

Spiraling fresh zucchini is legit I just did this recently and will be doing it again

I don't know squat about growing vegetables and my girlfriend wanted to plant a garden. I planted about 20 radish plants. In 2 weeks we had enough radish to supply the neighborhood for the entire summer.

Not overthinking it is a good first step.

I call my garden the “lucky garden” because only what survives my abuse and neglect survives.

Still end up with tons of tomatoes (from like mid-June and still eating the last to ripen indoors now), kale, peppers, parsley, basil, random squash & zucchini.

It’s all about yield÷effort for me.

> The fast growing and never ending vegetables seem to be the ones people don't like. Zucchini/courgette, squash, spinach I have piles of it but people don't want it

TIL. I was under impression that Zucchini and spinach are popular. At least in stores it seems like they are selling quickly. Sure if Zucchini is big one no-one wants to eat it but small ones?

> One year spinach survived the winter (-20C ish and 1m snow) and popped up in April.

That's literally wild, haha. Was it still edible?

Between cabbage moths and groundhogs, I have trouble growing much of anything except for mint and chard. Nothing touches that stuff for reasons uknown.