Vegetables Ingredients and Recipes

The carrot (Daucus carota) is a root vegetable, usually orange or white in color with a woody texture. The edible part of a carrot is a taproot. It is a biennial plant which grows a rosette of leaves in the spring and summer while building up the stout taproot, which stores large amounts of sugars for the plant to flower in the second year. The flowering stem grows to about 1 m tall, with umbels of white flowers.

Zucchini (US, Australian, and Canadian English) or courgette (New Zealand and British English) is a small summer marrow or squash, also commonly called Italian squash. Its Latin name is Cucurbita pepo (a species which also includes other squash). It can either be yellow or green and generally has a similar shape to a ridged cucumber, though a few cultivars are available that produce round or bottle-shaped fruit. Unlike the cucumber it is usually served cooked, often steamed or grilled. Its flower can be eaten fried or stuffed. Culinarily, zucchini is considered to be a vegetable. However, biologically, the zucchini is a fruit, being the swollen ovary of the zucchini flower. Zucchini are traditionally picked when very immature, seldom over 8in/20cm in length. Mature zucchini can be as much as three feet long, but are often fibrous and not appetizing to eat. Zucchini is one of the easiest vegetables to cultivate in a temperate climate. As such, zucchini has a reputation among home gardeners for overwhelming production, and a common type of joke among home growers revolves around creative ways of giving away unwanted zucchini to people who already have been given more than they can use. In 2005, a poll of 2,000 people revealed the courgette to be Britain's 10th favourite culinary vegetable. In Mexico, the flower (known as Flor de Calabaza) is preferred over the fruit, and is often cooked in soups or used as a filling for quesadillas. Closely related, to the point where some seed catalogs do not make a distinction, are Lebanese summer squash or kusa, which closely resemble zucchini but often have a lighter green or even white color.

Basil (Ocimum basilicum) of the Family Lamiaceae is also known as St. Joseph's Wort and Sweet Basil. It is a tender low-growing herb, originally native to tropical Asia. It grows to between 20–60 cm tall, with opposite, light green, silky leaves 1.5–5 cm long and 1–3 cm broad. It tastes somewhat like anise, with a strong, pungent, sweet smell. Basil is very sensitive to cold, with best growth in hot, dry conditions. While most common varieties are treated as annuals, some are perennial, including African Blue and Holy Thai basil. The word basil comes from the Greek ßas??e??, meaning "king", as it is believed to have grown above the spot where St. Constantine and Helen discovered the Holy Cross. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes speculations that basil may have been used in "some royal unguent, bath, or medicine". Basil is still considered the "king of herbs" by many cookery authors. An alternative etymology has "basil" coming from the Latin word basilicus, meaning dragon and being the root for basilisk, but this likely was a linguistic reworking of the word as brought from Greece.

Oregano (Origanum vulgare) is a species of Origanum, native to Europe, the Mediterranean region and southern and central Asia. It is a perennial herb, growing to 20-80 cm tall, with opposite leaves 1-4 cm long. The flowers are purple, 3-4 mm long, produced in erect spikes. The name means "Joy of the Mountains".

Celery (Apium graveolens dulce) is a herbaceous biennial plant in the family Apiaceae, native to the coasts of western and northern Europe, most commonly in ditches and saltmarshes. It grows to 1 m tall, with pinnate to bipinnate leaves with rhombic leaflets 3-6 cm long and 2-4 cm broad. The flowers are creamy-white, 2-3 mm diameter, produced in dense compound umbels. The seeds are broad ovoid to globose, 1.5-2 mm long and wide. Celeriac (Apium graveolens rapaceum) is closely related.

Asparagus is a type of vegetable obtained from one species within the genus Asparagus, specifically the young shoots of Asparagus officinalis. It has been used from very early times as a culinary vegetable, owing to its delicate flavour and diuretic properties. There is a recipe for cooking asparagus in the oldest surviving book of recipes, Apicius's 3rd century CE De re coquinaria, Book III. White asparagus is cultivated by denying the plants light while they are being grown. The English word "asparagus" derives from classical Latin, but the plant was once known in English as sperage, from the Medieval Latin sparagus. This term itself derives from the Greek aspharagos or asparagos, and the Greek term originates from the Persian asparag, meaning "sprout" or "shoot." The original Latin name has now supplanted the English word. Asparagus was also corrupted in some places to "sparrow grass"; indeed, John Walker stated in 1791 that "Sparrow-grass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry." In their simplest form, the shoots are boiled or steamed until tender and served with a light sauce like hollandaise or melted butter or a drizzle of olive oil with a dusting of Parmesan cheese. A refinement is to tie the shoots into sheaves and stand them so that the lower part of the stalks are boiled, while the more tender heads are steamed. Tall cylindrical asparagus cooking pots have liners with handles and perforated bases to make this process foolproof. Unlike most vegetables, where the smaller and thinner are the more tender, thick asparagus stalks have more tender volume to the proportion of skin. When asparagus have been too long in the market, the cut ends will have dried and gone slightly concave. The best asparagus are picked and washed while the water comes to the boil. Fastidious cooks scrape asparagus stalks with a vegetable peeler, stroking away from the head, and refresh them in ice-cold water before steaming them; the peel is often added back to the cooking water and removed only after the asparagus is done, this is supposed to prevent diluting the flavor. Small or full-sized stalks can be made into asparagus soup. Cantonese restaurants in the United States often serve asparagus stir-fried with chicken, shrimp, or beef. Asparagus is one of few foods which is considered acceptable to eat with the hands in polite company, although this is more common in Europe. Some of the constituents of asparagus are metabolised and excreted in the urine, giving it a distinctive, mildly unpleasant odor. The smell is caused by various sulfur-containing degradation products (e.g. thiols and thioesters). Studies showed that about 40% of the test subjects displayed this characteristic smell; and a similar percentage of people are able to smell the odor once it is produced. There does not seem to be any correlation between peoples' production and detection of the smell. [1] The speed of onset of urine smell is rapid, and has been estimated to occur within 15-30 minutes from ingestion [2]. The amino acid asparagine gets its name from asparagus, the asparagus plant being rich in this compound.

Template:Otheruses1 The cucumber is the edible fruit of the cucumber plant Cucumis sativus, which belongs to the gourd family Cucurbitaceae, as do melons and squash. The plant is widely cultivated today. The cucumber plant has large leaves that form a canopy over the fruit. The vine is grown on the ground or on trellises, often in greenhouses. The fruit is commonly harvested while still green, though generally after the fruits outgrow their spines. They are eaten as a vegetable, either raw, cooked, or made into pickled cucumbers. Although less nutritious than most fruit, the fresh cucumber is still a very good source of vitamin C, vitamin K, and potassium, and also provides some dietary fiber, vitamin A, vitamin B6, thiamin, folate, pantothenic acid, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, copper, and manganese. The pickling process removes or degrades much of the nutrient content, especially that of vitamin C. Pickling cucumbers are sometimes sold fresh as "Kirby" or "Liberty" cucumbers. They are 3-6 inches long (7.5-15 cm). They are often irregularly-shaped, and have bumpy skin with tiny white- or black-dotted spines. They are never waxed. They can vary from creamy yellow to pale or dark green. English cucumbers can grow as long as 2 feet. They are (nearly) seedless, and are sometimes marketed as "Burpless," as the seeds give some people gas. Japanese cucumbers are slender and deep green. They are mild, and have a bumpy, ridged skin. They can be used for slicing, salads, pickling, etc., and are available year-round. Cucumbers are usually green-skinned, roughly cylindrical, elongated, with tapered ends, and may be as large as 60 cm long and 10 cm in diameter. Cucumbers grown to be eaten fresh (called slicers) and those intended for pickling (called picklers) are similar. Slicers grown commercially for the North American market are generally longer, smoother, more uniform in color, and have a tougher skin. Slicers in other countries are smaller and have a thinner, more delicate skin. Picklers are generally shorter and thicker.

The beet (Beta vulgaris) is a flowering plant in the family Amaranthaceae, native to the coasts of western and southern Europe, from southern Sweden and the British Isles south to the Mediterranean Sea. It is important because of its cultivated varieties, fodder beet, beetroot and the sugar-producing sugarbeet. It is a herbaceous biennial or perennial plant with leafy stems growing to 1-2 m tall. The leaves are heart-shaped, 5-20 cm long on wild plants (often much larger in cultivated plants). The flowers are produced in dense spikes, each flower very small, 3-5 mm diameter, green or tinged reddish, with five petals; they are wind-pollinated. The fruit is a cluster of hard nutlets. There are two subspecies: The cultivated forms are thought to have come from sea-coast plants of Europe and Asia. With the imposition of the blockade of the continent during the Napoleonic wars there was an impetus to develop beet for their sugar content. The white Silesian beet, which was a fodder crop, received attention.

Coriander (Coriandrum sativum), also commonly called cilantro in North America, is an annual herb in the family Apiaceae. Coriander is native to southwestern Asia west to north Africa. It is a soft, hairless, foetid plant growing to 50 cm tall. The leaves are variable in shape, broadly lobed at the base of the plant, and slender and feathery higher on the flowering stems. The flowers are borne in small umbels, white or very pale pink, asymmetrical, with the petals pointing away from the centre of the umbel longer (5-6 mm) than those pointing to the middle of the umbel (only 1-3 mm long). The fruit is a globular dry schizocarp 3-5 mm diameter. The name coriander derives from Latin coriandrum, which was first noted by Pliny. The Latin word derives in turn from Greek corys, a bedbug, plus -ander, "resembling", and refers to the supposed similarity of the scent of the crushed leaves to the distinctive odour of bedbugs (largely forgotten in this age of insecticides).

A mushroom is an above-ground fruiting body (that is, a spore-producing structure) of a fungus, having a shaft and a cap. By extension, it designates the entire fungus producing the fruiting body of such appearance, the former consisting of a network (called the mycelium) of filaments or hyphae. In a much broader sense, mushroom is applied to any visible fungus, or especially the fruiting body of any fungus, with the mycelium usually being hidden under bark, ground, rotten wood, leaves, etc. Mushrooms obtain food through decomposition. The technical term for the spore-producing structure of "true" mushrooms is the basidiocarp. The term "toadstool" is used typically to designate a basidiocarp that is poisonous to eat.

A pea is the small, edible round green bean which grows in a pod on the leguminous vine Pisum sativum, or in some cases to the immature pods. This legume is cooked as a vegetable in many cultures. Several other seeds of the family Fabaceae, most of them round, are also called peas; this article deals with the species Pisum sativum and its cultivars. In the south of the United States, "pea" often refers to cowpeas, and Pisum sativum is distinguished by calling it green pea or garden pea. The pea plant is an annual plant, with a lifecycle of a year. The average pea weighs between 0.1 and 0.36 grams[1].