Wednesday 31 October 2007

"My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow"

The colleagues and I celebrated ding-dong-the-term-is-dead last night with a visit to the Ivanhoe pizzeria and pastarie, where mine goode selfe stupidly ordered the Vegetable Platter of the Day. I had fantasies of char-grilled aubergine swooning over a fricassee of courgette and sundried tomato, with butterbeans and garlic and olives and oil and asparagus spears and marinated vine leaves and champignons. Instead, $12.50 of virtuously steamed broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, with a couple of baked taters. Moral: go to Ivanhoe for your hoe, or your ho ho ho, or your Ivan, or your I, or your van (quite), not for your vegetable platter of the day.

Meanwhile, delirious with hunger, I start seeing superior vegetables lurking in every cranny of Western literature: Alexander Pumpkin, Russian Romantic; "Tomato, and tomato, and tomato"; "Lettuce go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky"; "Come live with me and be my spud"; "And the peas of God that passeth all understanding"; "To bean or not to bean"; and on and on and on. You wouldn't want to know. Really.

6 comments:

TimT said...

'Never mind, you never know what life is going to turnip' - apocryphal.

'Never chaste, except you radish me' - Donne.

'The Lady of Shallotts' - Tennyson

'To pea, or not to pea' - Shakespeare.

You're right!

Maria said...

"Anna Carrot-ina"

"Sprout, damned spot!" - Shakespeare

"Shallot I compare thee to a salad's array?" - Shakespeare

I'll be ....

Bean there, done that.

Maria said...

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a spam."

"After all, tomato is another day."

Scarlett was more of a vege gal, and Rhett more of a meat guy.

Alexis, Baron von Harlot said...

Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! HA! Amusing. Kudos to youdos. (But let us never mention spam again.)

TimT said...

I was promised on a time
To have raisin for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season
I received nor rhyme nor raisin. -Edmund Spencer

Know then thyself! - presume not God to scan -
the proper study of mankind is jam. - Pope

Maria said...

But lettuce never mention spam again?