bacon is not a vegetable

“So you’re a veg­e­tar­ian? No prob­lem! Peo­ple brought five dif­fer­ent veg­etable dishes!”

For any veg­e­tar­i­ans out there: How many times have you heard this bit of reas­sur­ance, only to go to the table and be faced with plate after plate of beautifully-grown veg­eta­bles that have been trans­formed into some­thing other than a veg­etable dish?

Green beans and onions cooked with chicken stock and sprin­kled with bacon?
Spinach with…bacon?
Mashed pota­toes with…bacon?
Brus­sels sprouts with…bacon?

For­tu­nately I’m not the strictest of veg­e­tar­i­ans. If the only options are veg­gies with bits of meat incor­po­rated into the dish, I’ll try to leave the meaty bits on the plate or eat around them. But there are plenty of folks I know who would decline the offerings.

We veg-heads are used to bring­ing our own dishes to these gath­er­ings. We also try to help out in the kitchen and tact­fully try to make gen­tle sug­ges­tions for sub­sti­tu­tions. But at a time of year when peo­ple focus on tra­di­tions, this is a del­i­cate issue that risks frac­tur­ing a fam­ily into upstarts and traditionalists.

There’s one easy sug­ges­tion that might please almost every­one at the table: Instead of putting bacon in every dish, why not fill a condi­ment dish with crunchy bacon bits that peo­ple could heap on top of their veg­gies? The veg­e­tar­i­ans would avoid it, leav­ing even more for every­one else! Also, you could offer a fla­vor­ful sauce on the side that could keep the bacon fans happy.

And of course, try­ing new prepa­ra­tions could come up with new fam­ily tra­di­tions. This Thanks­giv­ing prob­a­bly the most unusual dish was some­thing Olinda next door shared with us: a sweet and aro­matic prepa­ra­tion of sweet pota­toes and guavas. The plate looked sim­i­lar to tra­di­tional yams, but every­thing was heady with the aro­mas of fresh-baked guavas, some­thing that reminded me of the per­fume of flowers.

Olinda ran a Mex­i­can restau­rant until her recent retire­ment. Although sweet pota­toes and guavas is a tra­di­tional cel­e­bra­tory dish in Mex­ico, it unfor­tu­nately wasn’t one that ever showed up on the menu of her restau­rant. And I doubt that you’d ever see it offered at any main­stream Mex­i­can eatery.

I’m work­ing on Olinda to get her to divulge her recipe, but until I’m suc­cess­ful here’s a link to a recipe in the Texas Monthly that looks very sim­i­lar. Yes, it looks like a lot of sugar. This is a sweet dish, but I’m sure you could adjust the sugar to your lik­ing. But what­ever you do, don’t scrimp on the guavas!

(If you don’t have access to fresh guavas, there are a num­ber of recipes on the web that use the some­what eas­ier to find guava jam.)

December 03 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: • • • • • • • | 2 Comments »