For a brief window of time when I first moved to Los Angeles, I worked as a birthday party performer. I donned the costumes of Hello Kitty, Scooby Doo, a Power Ranger, Barbie and more, and ventured over freeways and through neighborhoods. I twisted long balloons into animals, flowers, and swords, performed some chintzy magic tricks, and did a bit of face painting. Many times the parents would just leave me alone with all of the children, while they went off to mingle with their adult friends. Let me assure you, it is very difficult to command authority when dressed as a lame green version of Barney.
“You’re not real!” a birthday boy chided me.
“Yes, I am,” I told him feebily.
“Nuh-uh. You’re extinct.”
When I wasn’t in the middle of balloon tying or child wrangling, I’d make chit-chat with the kids.
“So what’s your favorite food?” I asked a little blue eyed boy.
“Sushi,” he said.
Welcome to LA. I was floored. He was really bucking the perception that many people have that kids in America will only eat about four different foods. Those four dishes make up the children’s menu in every chain across the country and find their way into the rotation of lunchrooms again and again. ”That’s all they’ll eat,” parents say with a sigh.
Kids, like all of us, can get in a rut. We can get so stuck on an idea of what food we like or what a plate should look like, that we can miss out on some really delicious offerings that are outside of our standards. When I think of the first time a friend took me to an Indian restaurant, the menu was a curiosity to me. Those dishes weren’t things I’d grown up with, and when they delivered the shallow bowls of food to the table, I thought there was no way I’d leave full. Of course, now Indian food is one of my very favorite cuisines. I think once a person starts opening up her or his mind to to the idea that a plate doesn’t have to fit a certain look and takes a risk to try something new a few times, she may find her palate changing in ways she hadn’t anticipated. Why not break out of the ordinary and try a new restaurant, a new cuisine, or even just a new dish in one of your favorite vegan cookbooks?
Many people think food likes and dislikes live in a vacuum, but they don’t really. Sometimes it takes having things prepared a certain way or being introduced to a food a few times. There was a time in my life that I loved to go on vacation and eat nothing but fast food while I was away. Now that would be my own personal hell. When I go on vacation now, I start really missing greens, since they can be hard to come by at many restaurants and in some cities altogether. On the plane ride home, I’m thinking about my trip to the grocery store and the collards, kale, and chard that I’ll be piling into my basket. That idea would have been unbelievable to me five or six years ago.
My beloved greens were the star of tonight’s dinner from the Vegan Table. I replaced the chard in the Swiss Chard and Caramelized Onions dish with collard greens, because those are my absolute favorite dark leafy greens. I served them on a cornmeal crust, like Colleen suggests amongst her recipe variations. The brand of cornmeal crust is Vicolo, and they can be found in the frozen section of many natural food stores. The sweet caramelized onions are intertwined with salty olives and capers on a bed of greens. Instead of kalamata olives, I topped the pizza with the very buttery and smooth Castelvetrano olives. I added some pine nuts on top just before putting the pizza in the oven, because that’s how I roll. No need to toast them ahead of time. They toast fine just being in the oven. There was a time in my life when a pizza covered in greens wouldn’t have been my idea of a perfect meal. Now nothing could be more satisfying. A meal without greens simply seems incomplete.
So break out. Try something new. Give it a spin even once a week. No matter what happens, there’s no way it could be worse than corralling unruly children while dressed as an oversized kitten.
Tags: colleen patrick-goudreau, swiss chard and caramelized onions, vegan, vegan table, vegetarian
Mmmm, this pizza is one of my favorites! I crave the greens too!