Quick and easy succotash
Frozen vegetables are often more consistently nutritious because of the time involved between the field, the freezer, the supermarket and the table. If your fresh vegetables are picked in California on a Monday and don't make it off the truck in Georgia until the following Tuesday, those veggie nutrients have deteriorated quite a bit.
Most vegetables today are flash-frozen almost immediately after harvesting, and the frozen state preserves all the vitamins and other good-for-you stuff.
Do you think this might be why the frozen-vegetable case at the grocery has exploded? There are way too many combo choices to suit us and often, the sauces and seasonings added to the various blends taste downright noxious.
It takes a bit of rooting around in the freezer case to find what we're looking for vegetables, plain and simple. If there's going to be a sauce or seasoning involved, we want to be in charge of it.
Take today's Super Simple Succotash. Granted, this is an old-fashioned side dish, but it's hard to beat on nights when you want something quick, easy and very low in fat. This is the same succotash that both of our grandmothers used to make, except they had to harvest and freeze the vegetables themselves. So we suppose modernization and change should be celebrated but only up to a point!
Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross write “Desperation Dinners!” Contact them at Desperation Dinners, c/o United Media, 200 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016, or tellus@kitchenscoop.com. More at the Desperation Dinners website, kitchenscoop.com.