Love-veg, hate-veg relationship.

As a fresh connoisseur of boxed vegetables, I now have a love-veg and a hate-veg. Allow me to introduce...

My least favorite vegetable: artichoke!

This guy required not only cooking instructions, but also eating instructions! I was surprised to see them in the recipe, but they saved me from tucking into some unsavoury bits. After all the carving and roasting, what came out was a bunch of hard scales, each with a teensy bit of edible stuff on it, definitely not tasty enough to justify plucking them one by one. Would not bother again.

My most favorite vegetable: butternut squash!

Okay, this one was surprising. Squash is like pumpkin, which isn't my thing. But undeniably better. Squash is so cute, I giggled when I cut it in half. Roasted squash is so full of flavor: sweet, spicy, filling. There are always leftovers, and did you know that leftover squash makes delicate breakfast pancakes? Win, win, win. Squash is now a resident veg in our kitchen.

Honorable mention: aubergine. As in aubergine parmigiana: roasted with tomato sauce, breadcrumbs, and parmesan. It scratches the same itch as lasagna, but leaves me feeling more dance-y, less couch-y.

Do you know a veg that could dethrone my glorious squash? Or a way to redeem that horrible mess of an artichoke?