Vegetable Power

I am not talking antioxidants here but something that often seems even better. Yesterday was a pumpkin pie eating contest at Tierra Vegetables www.tierravegetables.com. Tierra is affectionately nicknamed The Cheers of Farmstands in my cookbook The Veggie Queen: Vegetables Get the Royal Treatment. All the judges in the contest were kids, one of them being my 13-year old son. But the problem was that it was too close to Christmas and the pie makers must have been busy so they didn't show up. (Last year there must have been close to 15 pies.) So while one of the parents ran to the store to get a premade pie, the other parents hung around the farm stand and shopped. This is where the veggie power comes in.

I was eyeing a large Graffiti Purple Cauliflower. My son wanted it (I am not sure why since he doesn't really eat it). And so did I but it was too big. A woman standing there was also admiring it. I asked her if she'd like to share it, and she said yes. Yippee. We both had what we wanted. Now, isn't there power in that? But it gets better.

Another woman, this time one of the moms, asked. "Are you the person that does something with vegetables?" She may have said The Veggie Queen but I'm not sure. She said that she read my blog and had commented on it. Then I recognized her as Kate from Sky Saddle Winery http://www,skysaddle.com, that zin that I had (written about here previously) that was so jammy, yummy, unctuous. Well, Kate told me that she's a vegetarian. It was getting even better.

I asked if she might want to trade wine for a copy of The Veggie Queen cookbook. And we made a deal. Now, it was truly my lucky day as Kate happened to have a bottle of Sky Saddle organic, biodynamically produced wine in the car because she had intended to ship it to Scotland but it turned out to be prohibitively expensive. I didn't have any copies of my cookbook in the car but I knew that Evie at Tierra had some so I borrowed a copy and voila, Kate and I were both happy. So there's the power of vegetables for you.

I suggest that you hang around veggies as much as possible, as they can definitely enhance your life, in many ways beyond the physical.