How to Make Vegetable Stew by Pat Brisson

Start with a pot big enough to hold all the ingredients,

many of your expectations, and some of your dreams.

Pour in just a little olive oil ? it's not a health food

despite what proponents of the Mediterranean Diet want you to think.

Let it slowly heat while you find an onion and chop it up.

Go ahead and cry, not just for the onion

but for any disappointment you never adequately grieved.

Stir it into the heated oil, and let the aroma take you back

to all those soups, sauces, casseroles and meatloaves

made in other kitchens, in other times.

Open two cans of low-sodium diced tomatoes or better yet,

use fresh if they're in season and you can afford them.

Stir them in and think about how empty our lives would be without tomatoes -

no pizza! no spaghetti! no lasagna!

not that you eat those things any more, but still, the memories are happy ones.

Add two or three cups of water and be grateful

you didn't have to carry it on your head from a well in the middle of town.

Open a can of black beans, and a can of cannellini beans

and wash off all the sodium before you stir them into the pot.

Wonder why it took you so long to appreciate beans.

Ditto lentils, as you pick through a cup of dried ones

looking for stones, which you've only found once

but were glad to locate with your fingers and not your teeth,

after spending all that money at the dentist.

Chop up some kale, chard, or bok choi and congratulate yourself

for your healthy choice of greens as you stir it in.

Check around for anything else you want to add:

celery, cabbage, carrots, corn, sweet potatoes, peppers,

any weird thing you thought you were going to use

in some recipe but didn't.

Add some spices - a bay leaf or two, savory, thyme,

herbes de Provence, dill or whatever you have

in your spice drawer that's almost expired, or, let's be honest,

expired years ago but you never threw away.

Simmer for a long time so you can savor the aroma

and whet your appetite.

Think about how one of the things people living in nursing homes

miss most is the smell of food cooking,

and be grateful for your own kitchen.

Stir it or don't -

this stew is flexible, forgiving, unpretentious;

it's accepting of just about any reasonable thing.

If this were a poem,

it would be the perfect metaphor for a Good Life,

but it's only Vegetable Stew,

so enjoy!