Learning to Love Convenience Vegetables: Cooking with MG

Long before myasthenia gravis (MG) and the eat-everything-imperative of prednisone entered my life, I loved food. Not necessarily cooking, but definitely eating. I never considered myself a real foodie — not compared to my gourmet friends and family and their complex recipes for things like duck breast with huckleberry sauce, sorrel soup, rose petal ice cream, and home made baklava. Still, I had a handful of staple, go-to recipes I confidently made for myself and friends, and that consistently got raves.

One thing I never did, ever, was buy prepared produce. No shredded carrots, garlic-in-a-jar, diced mirepoix mix, or broccoli florets for me. It was, I thought, both lazy and wasteful not to buy whole produce and chop or dice or mince it myself. You wouldn’t get the freshest, best flavors that way, and I didn’t want to contribute more garbage than necessary to the local landfill. Those prepared items in their plastic tubs and bags were out.

And then MG hit

And then MG hit. Suddenly I couldn’t peel and dice an onion, mince garlic, chop celery, or shred cabbage, let alone dismember and debone a chicken, without getting so fatigued I had to stop halfway. Or a quarter way. Or just give up.

At first I stopped cooking entirely. I worked my way back up to simple microwave meals, like adding cumin and crumbly cotija cheese to a can of refried beans. But Thanksgiving rolled around, and I just couldn’t imagine it without my grandmother’s cornbread dressing, which is reliant on knife skills. It needs at minimum: chopped celery, diced onion, and minced garlic to bring the party to the seasoned cornbread crumbs.

So, sitting in my wheelchair in the crowded grocery store, exhausted already as I stared at the produce, I caved: I bought a plastic tub of pre-diced celery. It was a revelation. Making my dressing was so much easier when I didn’t need to wash, destring, and chop up a bunch of celery, and the pre-diced stuff was just as flavorful. I had a little guilt about the plastic tub, but I sent it to recycling and decided it was a bearable sin.

Prepared vegetable options

The next several times I wanted to cook something that was going to take prep, I looked into my options, and I found many. Bags of shredded carrots, and Caesar salad kits with the romaine already chopped. Better than Bouillon stock starter that really does taste as close to homemade as advertised. The freezer aisle was even more rewarding, with frozen diced onion and frozen minced garlic. Frozen minced ginger, too. I became a devotee of frozen vegetables for casseroles, soups, and sides, and frozen fruit for smoothies and baking.

My favorite trick is cole slaw mix, but I don’t use it for cole slaw. It’s pre-shredded cabbage, perfect for stirfry. It goes like this: put some rice in the rice cooker and press go. Brown some ground pork or turkey, throw in a bag of cole slaw mix (without the dressing!) salt generously and wilt. Add a cube of frozen garlic, a cube of frozen ginger, and cook it all together, then finish with half a bottle of hoisin sauce and a little brown sugar and rice vinegar, and that’s a reasonably healthy meal in less than half an hour. By the time the rice is ready, the stirfry is good to go, and it makes good leftovers, too.

Useful tools for chopping and dicing

I also got myself a multi-function vegetable chopper and mandoline (always use the hand guard, kids!) because sometimes, for example, the recipe needs a sweet onion, and there isn’t a frozen version. The first time I used it, I was an instant convert. Peel and quarter your onion, put the large dice plate on the tool, and with 4 quick smacks, you have a whole diced sweet onion ready to go in the baked beans. Or whatever you’re making.

My point is, often those "as shown on TV" things are actually useful tools for disabled people, not just kitchen cheats for the lazy. And the same goes for store-prepped produce.

The 2-day cooking method

Another trick I often use is the 2-day cooking method. Process the ingredients into the forms the recipe needs on one day — diced onion, cubed potato, chopped fresh herbs etc.— and put them in nice little lidded containers in the fridge. Eat something else that night. Takeout. A sandwich. A bowl of cereal. The next night process the protein, get out the already prepped ingredients, and cook.

I told a friend who’s in culinary school about this, and he said, "Oh yeah, that’s totally how we do it." So it’s not even the cheat to accommodate my MG I thought it was — I accidentally discovered the mise en place method ubiquitous amongst professional chefs.

I’ve learned to love my convenience vegetables, because with them, I can cook again. And while I’m still not preparing duck confit, if I decided I wanted to, I could probably get there. And I can definitely cook my favorite staples again.