Becky's Veggie Tale

I obsess over healthy stuff during the summer.

"This is going to be the year I run twelve miles a day!" I have been known to say.

I am not running twelve miles a day right now, and school starts in a couple of weeks. Chances are, I will not be running twelve miles a day this summer . . . once again.

However, I am going to blog about something healthy: Vegetables!

I love vegetables. I don't only eat vegetables and cut out everything else. I also love a lot of things that are bad for me, and I eat plenty of that too. I was just born with taste buds that love vegetables.

I am pretty sure my parents thought they had the market cornered on how to raise a healthy eater.

When I was younger, I remember my mother telling me, "We didn't put up with picky eating. You had no choice but to eat what was in front of you."

I ate what was in front of me because I liked EVERYTHING. Plus, she didn't explain how that applied to my much pickier little brother who didn't eat everything in front of him.

At school, the teachers would ask us about our favorite foods. Other kids would say spaghetti, mac and cheese, and pizza. When it was my turn, I would proudly proclaim that my favorite food was cooked spinach.

My teachers found this amusing (and unusual).

"Becky says cooked spinach is her favorite food?" they would ask my mother during conferences.

"Yeah, she's kind of like Popeye in that way," my mom would respond.

(Last year, I asked my kindergartners what their favorite foods were. Several of them said, "sushi." How times have changed.)

Full disclosure: I never liked sweet potatoes as a kid. It was the one vegetable I wouldn't eat.

"Even when we gave them to you as a baby, you would just spit them out," my parents told me.

I love sweet potatoes now.

That brings me to okra. Okra is my other favorite food. It doesn't even have to be fried, although I'm fine with it if it is. My husband, Dan, thinks I'm crazy.

"It's slimy," he says with a crinkled nose.

"Oh my gosh! That's why it's so good!"

Lucky for him, we don't get much fresh okra in Idaho. I keep a bag of frozen okra year round though.

Last week at our CSA, I went to pick up our vegetables and was amazed to find a quart-size bag of okra as part of our share.
"OKRA! That's my favorite vegetable!"

"This is the first year we have been able to harvest it. We tried before, and it just died."

"Oh! This is so exciting!" I exclaimed.

Dan was gone that evening, so I cooked and ate the entire bag.

"Fine with me," Dan said later that night. "Sounds like it was the perfect night for me to be gone."

A few months ago, I was with my school's running club, and we had circle time before hitting the trails. All of the participants (including the teachers and parents) were asked, "What is your favorite food?"

When it was my turn, almost without thinking, I answered, "Cooked spinach."

All of the students paused and stared at me for a moment before nodding and moving on.

One of the parent volunteers leaned over and whispered, "My husband likes cooked spinach too."

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