Your mother always told you not to play with your food. But what fun is that? As I contemplate the chore of transplanting this season’s way-too-successful seedling growing endeavor – over a hundred hardy little tomatoes and peppers outgrowing their initial seed cells – I pause to take a look at having fun with vegetables.

Growing vegetables is fun, for one thing. It is amazing to see baby plants emerge from tiny seeds, and become sturdy little plants and eventually plants that can reach taller than my husband (who is more or less 6’3″). Last year (after watching a lot of YouTube videos) he even constructed a method of lowering the plants via a sort of pulley to get at the ripe tomatoes on the tallest plants, which sounds crazy but actually works.

Cooking vegetables can be fun, too. I try to cook with a lot of vegetables, and I’m always looking for inspiration and new recipes. During the pandemic, a group of friends and I got together via Zoom to cook every once in awhile. Since we are (still) in far-flung places, we have continued the practice. Vegetables are often featured in the recipes, though we have been known to deviate – our latest effort was scones. (Woman cannot live by vegetables alone!)

Lastly, you can get artistically creative with vegetables. When we were in Thailand some years back, we took a cooking course which started with making roses out of tomato skins, and something out of carrots which I can’t recall now, but maybe leaves like this. Playing with your vegtables is elevated into a high art there. Though I do recall my Mom teaching us how to make “radish roses” which is the sort of low art form in comparison.

Here are some of the vegetable pix I came up with when I did a search in my Google photos. They cover some of the above, plus a couple more fun vegetable moments. Eat your vegetables, but don’t forget to have fun with them, too!