Mysterious vegetable alert!

Be prepared for a shocking fact, folks...

I’m sent an awful lot of press releases and most are about useless things. But occasionally one makes me sit up and take notice.

Like this one - a survey revealing how kids are shunning vegetables. Brace yourself for a shocking fact:

65% of children have never tried cavolo nero.

OH MY GOD!!!

I hadn’t even heard of the stuff until my friend Adele showed me it in her garden. I mean, I’d thought it was an expensive make of car.

He pulled up to a halt at traffic lights, caressed his chiselled jawline and lowered the window of his Cavolo Nero…

It would definitely be that kind of car, wouldn’t it? Not one with a matting of dog hair and toddler vomit congealed in its crevices from 2003.

Or could it be a male fragrance?

Cavolo Nero.

She’ll want to touch your chest.

(It’s kinda spoiled when you find out it means ‘black cabbage’).

Anyway, when Adele showed me her lushly sprouting cavolo nero I was fifty-six and I’d never tried the stuff. This doesn’t strike me as being particularly weird. Sure, today’s youngsters are terribly sophisticated in their food habits - having been raised on sourdough and buckwheat and micro-herbs. Not so us boomers, dragged up on instant Smash and Mother’s Pride.

We ate carrots only if they had been boiled for nine days and could be sucked up through a straw. I didn’t encounter an aubergine until my late thirties. What was this firm, glossy purple thing and what should I do with it? So it was exciting to find out about cavolo nero - an entirely new foodstuff that had to be good for you, right? Being comprised of dark leaves.

A few months ago I bought some and ‘braised’ it in a pan, cluelessly.

Watch me render this vegetable inedible!

We sat eating it at dinner on a Monday and the following Friday we were still gnawing away, jaws in agony, until Jimmy said, ‘I’m sorry, this is like eating an electrical cable.’

I was prepared to be all affronted and defensive but actually, he was right. This ‘not knowing that the tough central stem should be removed prior to cooking’? It’s an old person thing, right? My offspring - aged 28, 28 and 24 - would know to do that. I’m not even talking about my son who’s a chef. They would all know!

Here’s what I used to think signified being old:

Cups of tea, Coronation Street, cake with a marzipan layer.

Now I’m old, I realise they’re not the real age signifiers at all. No, the things that really shout BOOMER - apart from my cavolo nero fuck-up - are as follows…

Never knowingly passing a public loo without using it (you never know where the next one will be).

Having runnier eyes! And a runnier nose! What else is about to get runny? Don’t even answer that. But now I realise why my dad carries a proper cloth handkerchief.

Using the word ‘handkerchief’.

Really minding people (noisily) licking salt off their fingers when eating crisps.

Scoffing at modern parenting trends - like ‘wearing your baby’. Yes, you have to wear your baby now, in a kind of harness! No pushing them along in a battered old pram, puffing on an Embassy Regal and scattering ash onto their head. Your baby is now a garment that must be adhered to your body at all times, Jesus wept!

Not caring about Mother’s Day (which in the UK is this Sunday). Okay, I do care in that I demand calls from each of my offspring at the very least (and, all right, cards and presents would not go amiss, if we’re being entirely honest). But the relentless ‘It’s Mother’s Day!’ hoo-ha for weeks before the actual day? I can do without that.

When I pop into Dad’s Giant Asda (it’s not really Dad’s Asda) I have to fight through acres of terrible gifts in order to get to the wine.

Here I spot a ‘midnight peony & leather multi-wick candle’ the size of your standard waste paper bin (but solid). Why would anyone want a candle that big?

There’s also an entire shelf of Haribo Heart Throbs. Is this what mums deserve after frying 8,000 sausages and watching a decade’s worth of nativity plays? Gummy hearts with a foamy bottom?

Because you’re worth it, Mum! (£1.25)

I know Haribo go all out at Halloween with their ‘scary’ Fangtastics but now they own Mother’s Day as well? Since my kids were little, ‘occasion-selling’ has really ramped up. Back then, in the early noughties, Mum would be lucky to get a piece of cardboard with a bit of pasta stuck on it.

I kind of liked those days - the Digestive biscuit brought to me in bed with a slice of apple stuck to it with jam. Or the card created with ozone-wrecking gold aerosol spray.

I guess I want the personal fuss – not the Asda-marketed fuss.

Sorry to go on about Asda. It’s just, I’m seeing a lot of my dad these days. He lives so close to a superstore that, if he were in possession of a barcode, he’d be able to roll over and self-scan himself from bed.

For many years I avoided big supermarkets, opting for online shopping/home delivery to avoid the living hell. The £4 delivery charge was totally worth it as I detest these places.

At least, I thought I did.

In fact, in the interim they have updated and Dad’s Giant Asda has everything you could possibly want - including cavolo nero, which I plan to saute for him with the central stem removed!

Well, Dad is 90. It’s about time he tried this stuff.

Love,

Fiona xx

PS On the subject of family matters, my brand new novel, The Full Nest, is about what happens when everyone piles back home, and instead of being a happy empty nester, Carly realises there’s no room for her...

One family home. Three generations. What could possibly go wrong? You can order your copy here!