That’s true - they’re Green-Zilla. I think they have their own Pantone card.
This would be because you like your caterpillar well done 
I didn’t really get that bit either - caterpillars aren’t any less or more palatable to me when they’re cooked Al dente.
I took it to mean removing anthing they might have left behind, like “cat scat.”
Ah, I see. I would imagine that prolonged boiling would dissolve the caterpillar poop and then infuse it into the vegetable quite thoroughly.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
When I first dated the man who was to become my husband, he had an aversion to vegetables.
I took him out to his first authentic Chinese food, and our meal was stir-fried fresh vegies and shrimp, and he was amazed. He loved it; he had only ever known sweet ‘n’ sour pork or egg foo yung. Then when I first cooked for him, I made a pot of fresh cauliflower and brussels sprouts, lightly cooked and still slightly crisp, and he devoured a huge plateful. He later told me that when he was growing up, he never tasted a vegetable that didn’t come out of a can, with the exception maybe of a bowl of iceberg lettuce salad. He thought cooked vegies by definition were mushy and oversalted.
Is there anyone here who has had both Mushy Peas and the kind of canned peas that are mushy? If so, how similar are they? Are Mushy Peas like those, or more like dal or hummus? I like dal and hummus, but I don’t like the mushy canned peas.
Mushy canned peas are definitely not bright green, or at least the ones I’ve had weren’t. They were a much darker green than fresh or frozen peas.
You should write a diet book. It could also be used as a drug-free method of inducing vomiting.
Where is that puking smiley…
I won’t tell you about the banana worms then.
Do they hatch into tarantulas?
When I google banana worms all I find are recipes for the most disgusting bread I could imagine. Army worms??!!??
OK, you made me do it…
I was practically sobbing up until the end there, ya bastard! 
Around here, overcooked vegetables are the norm.
Why? First off, veggies are dirty. “Night soil” is a common fertilizer and eating a nice salad that hasn’t been soaked in bleach first will probably give you dysentary (if your lucky).
Secondly, most vegetables aren’t exactly the nicest looking specimins. It’s not like America, where you throw out a tomato if it isn’t perfectly red and round. Here you just cut off the rotten parts, pick off the bugs, and hope. Vegetables are expensive, after all.
Finally, most people here don’t have cookstove tops, and cook over an open fire. You can’t do the neat quick frying stuff that we can do when you are cooking with fire.
Ah the Third World, where “all-natural” and “organic” are not buzzwords.
Even post war it must have been some sort of “western” tradition. My mother learned to cook from her parents Indian servants when she lived in Kenya as a girl. This proved to be a blessing in my childhood because she would cook things my friends had never heard of - curries, pasta (when all you could buy was spaghetti and macaroni and no made sauces) and the usual meat and 3 veg. But her 3 veg were like I cook them today. I used to eat at friends or billets on footy trips and wonder why the vegetables were cooked until tasteless.
My mother even taught me that when you make stews and use vegetables to flavour the stock, you throw them away on serving and replace them with freshly cooked carrots, onion , celery whatever because those used in cooking have given up their flavour to the dish.
And it makes perfect sense that vegetables would be overcooked in Cameroon. But I’m pretty sure the issues that make overcooking vegetables necessary there wouldn’t have been the case in the 20th century in Britain or the US, so it makes a lot less sense here.
Mushy Pea clarification: these are not meant to be some kind of sauce, they are meant to be some kind of veg.
And they aren’t really properly green. More a puky brown-green.
And sometimes, as I said, they don’t appear to have been cooked at all. There’s no happy medium for the college kitchen stoves I guess.
Yeah, actually you can - I have a cast-iron wok that fits very nicely over a campfire, and I’ve used it that way multiple times.
That said, it’s not quite as simple as throwing everything into a pot and boiling for a long time, or sticking meat on a spit and holding it over the flames.
Why would you have to overcook “dirty” vegetables? They’re only dirty on the outside.
Perhaps you don’t realize that “night soil” is a euphemism for human poop. As you are probably aware from recent news stories, it is not unusual for people to contract nasty diseases or die from eating food contaminated with human poop.
Therefor, if you suspect (or know) that your food that been exposed to human poop, you would want to boil it until it is sterile as opposed to cooked.