Loving it

Never more so that when I pluck it off the lopsided, wind-toppled, slug-frayed plants that my garden has managed to sustain. Look there's one there now (a slug) tucking into a juicy stem.

I've never understood why broccoli is so hated as a vegetable. Partly I think because this crisp, leafy, cut-and-come-again, grow-your-own version has been replaced by the 'green cauliflower'  mass-produced, supermarket variety that is all too easy to turn into an unappetising sludge. But it's also the case that, owing to a genetic variation, a considerable proportion* of people find it, and other members of the Crucifer family, bitter-tasting. This variation may have originally arisen as a protection against toxicity in some species but sadly it had also meant that the bitter-tasters don't get the health benefits of broccoli and all its cabbagey kin.

I however, love all green vegetables, best of all fresh-picked just as my father would bring  them in from his 'patch' cursing the slugs, caterpillars, birds, rabbits, sheep and whatever else had contrived to get there first. 

*There seem to be ethnic differences in detection. In most European populations only around 20% find broccoli bitter but among Native Americans the figure is 98%.