Bug-ged Out (in more ways than one)

I have one major peeve about cooking. For some people, cooking is a chore because of the all the washing up of crockery and kitchen utensils that comes with it. For others, it could be the complexities of the ingredients used in the production of any dish. For me however, the biggest turn off is having to wash vegetables before cooking them.

I HATE washing vegetables. To be specific, I hate washing green leafy vegetables.

This is why. (You may have to read this twice just to understand where I'm coming from)

I dislike the fact that leafy vegetables typically grow in random forms. No branch, stem or leaf is in similar placement to the next branch, stem or leaf and as such, each branch/stem/leave gets tangled with its neighbour making it impossible to wash the vegetables equally. By equally I mean using roughly the same amount of time or water cleaning every branch, making sure that every inch is clean. Well, I could try.. but it would take hours to work through the lot. And the fact that I can't do that, irritates the heck out of me.

So what do I do? I fill the sink up with cold water and dunk the lot in with hopes that it will get equally washed. The only problem with this is, there usually is so much of vegetable piled atop each other that I can only rinse the top layers of veg with my hands and I can't get to rinsing the bottom lot without getting all the leaves and branches tangled up. That AGAIN irritates me.

On top of that, leafy vegetables always attract bugs, worms and insects of every kind. Each time, I kinda shrink back from sticking my hand into the water to rinse the bottom lot because there always is a worm hiding somewhere. One may crawl up my wrist in attempt to avoid a drowning death. And because this paranoia somewhat prevents me from washing the veg properly, I am again irritated!

ARGH. Its a no win situation with vegetables.

I found this in my pile of veg in the sink the other day.



Ok.. so its not as scary or as yucky as a worm. In fact, I felt quite a bit of compassion for this little fella so I scooped it out and sent it flying out of my window.

I cannot really describe the amount of irritation I feel regarding the washing of vegetables but I'm sure somewhere, someone else has to feel the same way as I do about this. The unfortunate thing is, I have to face this irritation on a weekly, if not daily basis because the vegetable dish is a must on the dinner table every day. And for the chinese, the leafy vegetable is the most common dish served so there is no getting way from it.

Vegetables.. for all the benefits that supposedly come with eating it, I'm not quite sure its worth all the irritation I have to endure just to get there. Leafy vegetables... BAH!

cheryl