So, vitamin based side dishes consist out of either salads or some sort of cooked vegetables.

Well, I say cooked, heated in some form might be better served in this case, to avoid suggesting that they are merely cooked in water.

They can be fried, steamed, cooked or baked, and whatever else you can imagine.

Salads have a dressing, a common way of making them is with a sweet and sour dressing. But that is not the only way. Some make them with yoghurt or similar things, and others change the base taste of the dressing, simply not adding something sour, for example.

The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.

While salads have a tendency to become more of an appetizer than a proper side dish, cooked vegetables do not have that tendency.

Cooked vegetables come in many varieties, the base ones I have mentioned before.

One thing to consider, mushrooms and similar life forms outside the classical divide between plant and animal are, quite often, counted as plants for things like this.

So, let us begin by talking about the most basic kind of cooked vegetable.

Throw it onto a skewer and hold it over a flame. Depending on the dish, the meat might be on the skewer at the same time.

A tasty, fairly quick and easy to do meal. Bonus points if you add at least some seasoning and so on.

The next most simple thing to make is soup, but soup is, essentially always, either served before or after the main course, or is the main course. But it is rarely, if ever, a part of the main course.

So, let us ignore that, and maybe talk about soups at a different time.

After the soup, although this might not be the historic progression, but who cares about things like actually knowing what one is doing, wait right, thats my job here.

Forget what I just wrote, ok?

Ok, where was I? Oh, after the soup you might get the idea to use less water, which gets you something similar to steamed vegetables, but not exactly, because they do not cook entirely in the steam, but also in the water and their own juice.

This has advantages over steaming them, but depending on what kind of vegetable you have, this can make the vegetables break down very easily.

On the other hand, there are some vegetables where there is literally no difference between properly steaming them, and putting them into a very shallow water bath.

The next stage is mixing multiple kinds of vegetables, because until now I have just assumed that you merely put one variety into the water bath. This can already massively enhance the flavor, simply because of contrast.

When you have done that, you might add more things to the water, like herbs or fats, like butter.

Things can very quickly get very complicated that way.

Another popular method of preparing vegetables is to fry them in a pan. Only few, select vegetables work well with that technique, and for frying vegetables there is a rule. The nearer you get to deep frying, the less vegetables actually work well with that. But when frying you can also add things that you could not add before…

Depending on if available, getting a few vegetables, cutting them in chunks of a size that fits comfortably in your mouth, putting some oil, herbs and other seasonings on them, and the throwing the resultant mixture into an oven, the thing that is fairly important to pull this of well, can result in a very nice, and fairly easy to make side dish. Although you should keep in mind that it might need to stay in the oven for a surprisingly long time.

The varieties of things you can do with vegetables are almost literally endless.

And a lot of those things even taste well. I am certain that you, if you are someone who can actually digest vegetables, will find some variety of vegetable that will taste very good to you.

I personally like certain vegetable dishes that arose out of preservation techniques.

Thats always a fascinating source of flavor. Because it is something so vitally important for such a long time in most civilizations, preservation techniques tend to be very well studied on a cultural and social level. Not necessarily a scientific level, although early science has a tendency to study the preservation of food, but still.

Another thing with preserved foods is that it is difficult to preserve a large variety. There might not be many foods available that are preservable with reasonably little effort, remember, you need to preserve enough to last at least the winter, which means large amounts, which in turn means a lot of effort to preserve even a little would be problematic.

Although some of those issues can be solved through the magic of economies of scale. If the amount of effort needed to preserve one kilogram of the food is not all that different from the amount of effort needed to preserve a thousand kilograms of food, it is quite possible, if not probable that this food will be one of the more commonly preserved foods.

Especially if it is easier to preserve a thousand kilograms of that food than a thousand kilograms of a food that is significantly easier to preserve at lower volumes.

Another issue that affects many preservers of food is availability of raw materials. Not necessarily the food you actually want to preserve, but what you need for that. And certain food only let themselves be preserved by certain methods of preservation.

Those raw materials necessary can be something as obscure as certain atmospheric conditions, or something as easy to quantify as salt. Or rather table salt.

Here is another thing. Do not just assume that what they call salt is what you call salt. Translation spells always have issues with such things.

While it is ver probable that they use at least a salt for that, NaCl, the salt I personally use for seasonings on food, is not the only type of salt out there.

And making a mistake here can have horrible consequences for your body.

Like killing that fairly vital part of you.

Although beings that can survive the loss of their body, while not exactly common, are also not exactly unknown, so, maybe you are part of that rare group of beings.

This reminds me. Translation spells, or technological solutions to that issue are not, by any means perfect. They are however, quite often, close enough to let you assume they are perfect. Wich can be very dangerous, especially if you use a very similar meaning for specific words, but the actual things referred by that word are informally very different things.

Salt is a great example of this.

Anyways, enough for now. Maybe I continue this chapter latter, or I start a new one. No idea yet.