Vegetable Forward

If you ever happen to go wine tasting, you're bound to hear some interesting descriptions of the beverage that you are consuming. I'm starting to pick out a few ingredients in my food, but there's no way I can match all of the adjectives and descriptions that someone describing wine can. I'm not sure I even know what some of those fruits look like, much less what they taste like.

Still, one of the more interesting things I've heard is "fruit forward." Basically, you can really taste the fruit. That doesn't necessarily mean that the wine is sweet, but it does mean that you should be able to taste whatever fruit they put in the wine. It sort of makes sense when you stop to think about it, but it's not a term I hear all that often in daily life. However, the Mild Girlfriend and I just so happened to hear it a while back at a wine tasting thing. It just sort of stuck out in our minds.

Now, fast forward a few weeks, and we'd gone out to eat a couple of times one weekend. It wasn't intentional, but we just happened to have burgers, beef, and pork during our meals. At some point, we stopped to think about it, and realized that we had had quite the carnivorous set of meals. The Mild Girlfriend is much better about managing her diet, so she suggested that we have a lot of vegetables to help balance things out. We couldn't retroactively change what we had eaten, but we could definitely put a lot more greens in our life for the immediate future. It'd keep our colons from exploding, really.

Well, I'm no stranger to vegetarian dishes, so this didn't faze me in the slightest. I figured we'd probably have salads or simply leave meat out of dishes (like a spinach lasagna). But not, the Mild Girlfriend was two steps ahead of me. We didn't exactly outlaw meat for the immediate future, we just made sure that there were lots of vegetables in the dishes we ate. Even if there was ground beef in something we cooked, for example, we wanted there to be lots of vegetables. Again, we were trying to keep our digestive systems happy.

As we were talking about it, the term sort of naturally popped out: "vegetable forward." We were trying to cook dishes that were vegetable forward. The whole thing amused me to no end. The best part, though, was that I then met up with some other friends for dinner. At a steakhouse. And during the course of that meal, the whole "vegetable forward" thing came up. You should have heard the laughter from people when I was explaining "vegetable forward" while munching on a (large) steak.

All of this, however, has made me think that we may have to go wine tasting again at some point. Clearly there is tons of untapped potential for comedic gold there.