You Can Boil Most Vegetables

This article won't be very useful to you if you're a real adult who knows how to cook real dishes.

I'm following Neel Nanda's advice and writing about a cool thing I learned recently. And the most life-changing thing I learned this year was that You Can Boil Most Vegetables. Just like pasta. And they will actually taste good! 

I won't waste your time discussing why vegetables are good for you, but I will mention something I never saw mentioned before — if you need a certain amount of side-dish or sauce to compensate for dryness/chewiness of the protein part of your meal, boiled vegetables will do the job perfectly while costing you about 0 calories. 

Pros of boiling your vegetables vs frying them:

• Almost entirely unattended — don't need to babysit your broccoli so it doesn't start burning. 
• You can cook bigger amounts at a time.
• Pots are easier to wash than pans.
• No extra calories from oil.
• No teflon paranoia / cast iron seasoning hassle. 

Most vegetables take from 3 to 15 minutes to cook, and it will take additional 3 to 15 minutes peeling and cutting. If you have a big pot you can boil enough for at least three days in one go. If you only have a small pot get a bigger pot. Boiled vegetables are of little interest to spoilage bacteria compared to, say, meat, so you can store them in fridge for almost a week. 

No more 'but I don't have an oven', 'but I don't know how to cook', 'but I don't have time'. You're allowed to start being nice to your microbiome. 

List of vegetables I boiled successfully (I'm only including low-carb vegetables, you don't need me to tell you that you can boil a potato):

• Parsnip (12 minutes, start in cold water)
• Turnip (15 minutes, start in cold water)
• Broccoli (3 minutes, add to boiling water)
• Cauliflower (15 minutes, add to boiling water)
• Fennel (12 minutes, start in cold water)
• Carrots (15 minutes, start in cold water)
• Cabbage (5 minutes, add to boiling water)
• Celeriac (don't bother with this one, it's impossible to peel)
• Asparagus (5 minutes, add to boiling water. This one is the only tricky one — you need to trim off the chewy part of the stalk before boiling)

Vegetables I personally didn't try boiling but it seems like other people are doing it:

• Beetroots
• Kohlrabi
• Brussels sprouts
• Green beans
• Spinach
• Leek
• Pumpkin

So, I'm proposing an experiment: 

1. Pick two vegetables from the lists. 
2. Buy a kilo of each. 
3. For the next week, replace half of the carbs in all of your plates with vegetables. 
   • It's hard to spoil vegetables by boiling, except maybe broccoli, but if you don't feel adventurous just google "How to boil X" before starting.  
   • Keep a bag of pre-washed lettuce in fridge in case you really don't have time to cook. I'm nice so I will count it as a vegetable. Bonus point if it's something other than iceberg.

It took me several months of being in pain to finally find courage to transition to keto from a diet of soylent and ready meals (yeah) and I was shocked how easy it actually was to fry a steak and boil some broccoli. So hopefully this experiment will be convincing. 

P. S. If you have a freezer, frozen vegetables are even easier but they often don't taste as good. The ones that go in little pre-portioned plastic bags that you can microwave are usually great though.