It bugs me when restaurants offer vegetarian options on their menu with crazy vegetables in them. It’s like they assume that just because someone is a vegetarian, they automatically like vegetables that most meat eaters wouldn’t touch, like eggplant and lima beans and okra. Heck, I don’t even particularly like carrots.
This rant is brought on by the fact that we recently went to the Baby Show here in Ottawa where several baby-related companies had displays, and one of them was this awesome catering service that comes to your home with bags of groceries, and either uses your kitchen to prepare a week’s worth of meals for your freezer, or they leave the groceries with recipes for you to prepare yourself. I got pretty excited because and I are terrible cooks and totally uninterested in using our kitchen under normal circumstances, let alone when we’ve each had 5 hours of sleep in 1-hour intervals. But sadly, the company’s selection of vegetarian dishes (which is actually quite extensive — at least 10 main courses) all involve crazy vegetables that I wouldn’t touch unless, possibly, smothered in high-fat ice cream. I don’t want an eggplant and lima bean casserole. I just want some gnocchi and tomato sauce.
Is it too much for a picky vegetarian to ask?
TurtleHead 
I think the problem is that they need to charge you money for the service they provide. Should they make you a gnocchi and tomato sauce dish what would be the premium you’d pay for that? They’d make it and put it in your freezer. Equivalently you could go to the store and buy fresh gnocchi and a jar of tomato sauce. Granted if you were to make that you’d have to get a pot dirty, open a jar and nuke some sauce as opposed to just nuking whatever they’ve put in your freezer. I’d pay maybe a dollar. With the price of gas what it is, I’m sure these people won’t be making the trip to our house.
However, if you were interested in an eggplant and lima bean casserole then you’d probably find that it’d be a lot of work to make yourself. You’d have to get actual vegetables at your house and they’d have to be good on the day you wanted to make your casserole. There would be way more dishes involved and actually cutting and cooking.
And you never know, you might like a good eggplant lima bean casserole. I’m sure that one day you were thinking “Gnocchi? What the heck is that and who would put potatoes in pasta? Why can’t I just get a plate of plain macaroni when I go out for dinner?”
i went on a cruise in china for 7 days and all i ate was congee, rice, bok choy…oh..and soy sauce.