Eat your greens, but not mine I like them now

A STROUT

Mainly in my young years, well until I was 25-years-old, I hate Brussels sprouts and all other greenery with the exception of peas.

That Christmas time the humble sprout comes in for a lot of stick, which I believe, is unnecessarily, now. I don’t know why the sprout is synonymous with Christmas dinner maybe because they were seasonally years ago. Has a child, into my teens and early adulthood, I hated them! Mum would insist on putting them on my plate along with other kinds of greens, knowing I only like peas. I would push the mass of green stuff to the side of the plate while giving mum the evil eye.

The years roll by and the offensive pile got small and small until it just stopped, I had won the war, the fourteen-year war by my reckoning. Thinking back, but for peas, my plate would be green free and look a bit pale. Potatoes, roasties’, turkey and peas, luckily I liked gravy. I was greens, sprouts free until the age 25 years-old, the reason for my newfound enjoyment of the greenery stuff stops at the door of future mother-in-law.

That my first Sunday dinner at her house she quickly put me in my place has I reeled off my list of dislikes. She told me to grow up, proceeded to piled allsorts greenery on to my plate, and kept her eye on me, just to make sure I was lapping it up. I insist on my sprouts are well boiled, so they melt in the mouth. I am not a fan of crunchy vegetables and sick of the likes of Gordon Ramsey tell me vegetables would taste better lightly cooked, keeping the crunch and flavour.

The spout comes from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan area finding its way to the Belgian capital of Brussels in the sixteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, they had arrived in the UK.

In memory of my mother-in-law Lillian McCowen