Some people think I don’t like vegetables. Not true. I just don’t like them boring. Put a beautifully-arranged veggie tray on your party table and I won’t even see it. (Chocolate can be very distracting.) And I sure won’t be joining up with the green smoothie movement.

But there’s something wonderful about a perfectly stir-fried pea pod or slice of onion. Which I managed to achieve in tonight’s dinner.

I might have to call this dish Pasta Accidente. While fighting my way through the packed aisles of Kroger yesterday, I picked up a box of linguine and tossed it into my cart. Evidently, the box wasn’t glued shut and the noodles shot all over the cart, scattered on the floor, blocked my shopping cart’s wheels.

The stock boy they sent to clean up the mess hurried around corner and took one look. “Oh, I thought it was going to be sauce.” He looked relieved.

Actually, the dish is called:

PASTA PRIMAVERA

pasta primavera

The broccoli was shy and didn’t want to look at the camera.

6 oz. packaged linguine or fettuccine
3 TB butter, divided
2 cups broccoli florets
1 cup bias-sliced carrots
1 medium onion, cut into thin wedges
1 clove garlic minced
1 cup fresh or frozen pea pods
1/2 cup cashews or almonds
1/4 cup chicken broth (the original called for white wine)
1 tsp dried thyme, crushed
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Cook pasta. Drain well. Meanwhile in a large skillet melt 2 TB of the butter. Stir in broccoli, carrots, onion, and garlic. Cook and stir over medium-high heat about 3 minutes or until broccoli is crisp-tender.

Stir in pea pods. Cook 2 minutes more. Stir in cooked pasta, remaining butter, nuts and seasonings. Cover and cook 1 minute more. Transfer to a warm serving plate. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Makes 8 servings. 210 calories per serving. From my very beat-up Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook.

We ate it with this previously-featured chicken.

It has been all I can do to spare an hour or so a day to plow through The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.

Naked was Mailer’s first novel. Written immediately after WWII, it sold like iPhones, possibly because Americans wanted to make sense of the drama they had just been through. Mailer admits that it’s an unwieldy book, full of beginner’s mistakes. But he went on to fame and fortune, so a few newbie missteps didn’t hurt him much.

His way of making sense of the war seems to be showing all its banal moments. His characters might have signed up for the Army hoping to live through glorious, heroic moments. Those Japs just poked us in the eye and we’re gonna poke back!

So they land on a Pacific island. They hear guns and artillery coming out of somewhere. They hear rumors of imminent attacks. But life for them is a lot of hurry up and wait. It’s a bad camping trip, with tropical rains blowing their tents to pieces and leaving the clothes and blankets wet for weeks on end. It’s bad decisions by their leaders; someone decides to move cannons a few miles, on slippery mud. This is gruntier grunt work than any one of these soldiers ever did before. And in tropical heat.

Since this is a tropical island, I’d think somebody might take a moment to appreciate the beauty. Not break into a Rodgers and Hammerstein song or anything, but still . . .   Then I remember that these guys are here to litter the place with barbed wire, bombed-out Jeeps and dead bodies.

And speaking of trashing things, they all trash-talk their women. While we’re out here putting up with the rain and the *&*@%@ colonel, our woman back home are cheating on us. Yeah! Partying every night! You can’t trust a woman. And how do we know this? Heh-heh, we’ve slept with a few officers wives, heh-heh.

I’m only halfway through. It’s been a labor thus far. The characters — well, imagine your high school yearbook, one of those pages of sophomores, dozens of thumbnail photos, too many to take in. That’s Mailer’s cast, although every other chapter is called “The Time Machine,” in which he hones in on one man, pre-war, telling a back-story of hopes, dreams and Daddy troubles.

It has taken 400 pages to get myself hooked. What did the trick was two men who resent each other. Character A unknowingly stands in a trap and Character B is about to pull the string.

Cow patty count is 8 out of 10. These soldiers are far from Sunday School, if they ever went at all, and they swear nearly as often as they breathe. As for the sex, it gets talked about a lot, but we are spared blow-by-blow detail. Mostly, The Naked and the Dead is a tale that paints the human condition in gloomy colors.

Its message is: we got ourselves into this and it wasn’t what we expected.

You could probably tell a story like this yourself. Surely you’ve gotten yourself into a few promising projects that left you knee-deep in trouble.

Do tell.