10. Onions
Perhaps the most polarizing vegetable out there, onions get a bad rap because they're quite pungent as a raw ingredient. Truth be told though, I like raw onions, especially on chili, hot dogs and especially in salsa. Obviously, as a cooked food, their versatility is almost unmatched. People take the stinky bulb for granted, but it's used as a building block in so many dishes and sauces. Onions and beef go together like
9. Red Bell Peppers
Green peppers are way too bitter most of the time, but whatever balance of chlorophyll or whatever other pigments or natural, organic chemicals that make red peppers that much milder is definitely a miracle of nature. The fact that red peppers can be eaten raw without facial contortions is proof enough for me at their superiority. They can be stuffed with bread or with some kind of meat (stuffed peppers with turkey are surprisingly delicious and super healthy), but I prefer to roast them on the grill and marinate them in olive oil, garlic and some salt and parsley.
8. Celery
Celery? Celery?! CELERY?!?!?!?! Yes, celery is on here at #8. One might ask why, as in its raw form, it's kind of flavorless and that one can actually burn off more calories than a stalk contains by eating said singular stalk. However, one might be surprised at how well it works both raw and cooked. Raw, it's refreshing and crisp in salads, providing a nice, subtle flavor along with its more textural role. It's a total blank canvas when it comes to filling its valley... heh heh, filling its valley. Anyway, cream cheese, peanut butter and my personal favorite, Nutella, all go well with celery providing an inoffensive crunch in the background. Where it shines brightest though is in soups though. The way it tenderizes, almost caramelizes, is just fantastic. It's just a nice contrasting texture to its raw state. Plus the flavor gets skipped up a bit too. It's weird, but it's wonderful.
7. Jalapeno Peppers
Obviously, they're not the hottest peppers in the lot, but that's okay. I mean, the Thai chili, habanero pepper and the indomitable ghost chili all have places in the pantheon, but sometimes, I just want some flavor and flexibility to go with my capsacin. I mean, everyone compares peppers to the jalapeno like it's this base thing and like only heat matters. It's a maligned pepper. Not to me though. Stuffing a habanero with cream or cheddar cheese and deep frying it is some Adam Richman shit (no disrespect, love Man Vs. Food), but if I want to eat a pepper popper and not spew fire out both ends for days on end, I'm going to use a jalapeno. It's also great for flavorful salsa with a kick or just for sauteing with egg whites (or eggs if you're not like me and have an aversion to yolks most of the time). It's a great signpost pepper.
6. Cauliflower
It's funny, for foods that look similar, no two vegetables could be further apart on the taste scale than broccoli and cauliflower. Broccoli is on the bitter side, needs cheese or other kind of fat to make it taste good. Not that cauliflower doesn't taste good with all that stuff, but raw it's got a great, mild taste. What shoots cauliflower up the list though is the potential to mash it as a faux-potato. If anyone has ever had mashed cauliflower, they'd know what I'm talking about here. It's like a mashed potato, but it's creamy and cheese integrates better into it. Plus, it's way lighter. It's good in all other applications, but mashed cauliflower is the real all-star application.
5. String Beans
Even as a young kid, I ate the crap out of string beans, despite the fact that I rarely ever had them fresh and usually ate them canned, supermarket-style, just heated up. That's the mark of a great veggie; it tastes righteous even in the most processed, preserved state. On the rare occurrence when we did eat them fresh, I always got the job of cleaning and snapping them, which for a little kid was really fun. Nowadays, it's basically sauteing them in olive oil and red pepper flake and using them as the go-to side dish for whatever main course is on the table. Tonight, in fact, we had them with a roast beef. Good eatin'. I'm also a huge fan of Chinese food restaurants doing them up in garlic sauce. As someone who distrusts most Chinese takeout's meat supplies, it's a great vegetarian option that keeps me filled up.
4. Raw Carrots
Very few vegetables have such a contrast in quality between their cooked and raw states. Raw carrots are crunchy, fresh-tasting and slightly sweet. Cooked carrots for the most part taste like a flavorless mush Jebediah Springfield likes to call root marm. The difference is that much different, although an exception is made for carrot cake, which is awesome. But this is a vegetable list, not a confectioner's list, and carrot cake is Sammy Sosa-and-Mark McGwire-taking-turns-injecting-each-other-in-the-ass-with-steroids-level cheating. The best development in the last 50 years has to have been baby carrots. It's carrot-eating for lazy people, but I'm pretty lazy. The perfect healthy snack food.
3. Spinach
I want to know where spinach got this terrible rap from. It was vilified, absolutely vilified by nearly everything marketed to kids with the exception of Popeye. Let's face it though, Popeye was an ugly sailor. Spinach, probably more than any vegetable other than broccoli, was portrayed as the poster child for kids not eating their vegetables. It's bullshit, really, because spinach is fucking delicious. It's versatile in that it's great from raw applications in salads to being absolutely cooked down and creamed. It's amenable to all kinds of different cooking techniques and ingredient combinations. It's not too strong, but it's not a pushover either. It's great in calzones, excellent wilted and sauteed in garlic and oil, but my favorite application is cooking it down until it's almost creamy in oil, garlic, Parmesan cheese and crushed red pepper flake, making almost a spread that goes great on cheesesteaks, chicken cutlet sandwiches and cheeseburgers.
2. Green Asparagus
Yes, it makes liquid emissions from the urethra smell bad. It's a small price to pay for the uniquely-flavored stalks of grass-looking vegetable. It comes thick or thin, and really, it tastes absolutely nothing like any other vegetable out there. This isn't a bad thing, because it's a great taste. Of all the green veggies, asparagus makes the best "cream of" soup, and for someone who digs his soup, that's not trivial. Surprisingly, I found out another great serving-style for the 'grass at Chima (the venue's not the surprise here). They have it blanched and shocked on their salad bar, and it's still amazing. It's also the fattest kind, which is a testament to the veggie altogether, as most people like it thin (I prefer it thin, but thick is good too).
1. Garlic
I needed a ruling on this, because I thought garlic would be too much of a runaway winner here. I thought it might have been an herb, but it's a member of the onion family, so I'm counting it here. If anyone knows me, they'll know that I'm a garlic fanatic. I use it in nearly every savory dish I make. IT just enhances the flavor of anything, from marinara sauce to taco meat to omelets and everything else. The best part about the stinky rose though? It's very underrated as a standalone ingredient/component. Now, I'm not saying it should be eaten raw; however, when it's roasted? It's FUCKING DIVINE. I love eating them by themselves, but they're great smeared on bread or, my favorite application, smeared on a hamburger bun as a topping for cheeseburgers. You're damn right.
Also receiving votes: Eggplant, Chinese Water Chestnut, Poblano Pepper
