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Knowing which vegetables make you fart is half the battle.

By Molly Burke, University of Texas at Austin

There will come a time in your college career when you feel the urge to branch out from your humble culinary foundations.

Maybe you’re sick of thrice-daily Chick-fil-a, or perhaps you need to one-up a friend who’s talented in the kitchen. It’s easy to cook delicious food at home if you know what you’re doing.

Luckily, the minimum intelligence requirements for good cooking are astonishingly low. This is something the people at Food Network caught on to early, as evidenced by Paula Deen and Guy Fieri.

It just goes to show that if you can think your way out of a paper bag or bad highlights, you can master a casserole.

How to Vegetable Responsibly

If you’ve ever been on a health kick after one too many nights knocking back row after row of Oreo Fudge Cremes, you know that while having a cleaner diet can make you feel accomplished, it can come with its own set of drawbacks.

For one, eating healthfully can coincide with out-of-control flatulence. This is often the result of getting veggie wasted, as vegetables come chock-full of dietary fiber and other militantly indigestible forms of carbohydrates.

There’s a time and a place for ripping mad broccoli farts, and maybe for you, library snacktime or a dinner date with a reasonably dignified suitor doesn’t make that list.

Luckily, #notallvegetables are out to sabotage your social life with uncontrollable gas! Here are some veggies that won’t make you pray for a swift death a couple hours into stifling your normal bodily functions.

Bell Peppers

Pan-sear them with chili powder, garlic and lime juice, and wrap them up in a tortilla with beef or chicken fajita meat. Can also be eaten sans meat for a sad but cultured vegan experience.

Leafy Greens

The big ones are spinach, kale and chard, in order of least to most likely to be spat into the trash. The key is to temper their wholesome, obnoxious bitterness with a good steaming.

Chop them up and add to scrambled eggs or toss with walnuts and vinaigrette for a warm salad, which isn’t nearly as repulsive as it sounds. Or, blend them raw into a smoothie with bananas and chia seeds to channel your inner green goddess.

Zucchini

This phallic veggie is the stretchy support undergarment of Italian cuisine, because it works with nearly every conceivable dish and compensates somewhat for all the cheese you’ll be eating.

Bake it into lasagna, layer it in an impressive swirly pattern for ratatouille, or buy zucchini chips and whip up a platter of morally ambiguous nachos.

Onions

Slice into rings and caramelize with canola oil, then put them in anything—salads, empanadas, ice cream. You’d be surprised at how many weird ways people accent dishes with caramelized onions. I guarantee that there’s a food blogger out there who shares your twisted onion-related fantasy.

Brussels Sprouts

Deep fry in canola oil with salt and pepper and accept me as your savior. Yes, I know, deep-frying does tend to violently compromise a food’s health benefits. But you were awake for almost half of your classes this week and you deserve a treat. Drizzle these with spicy mayo and save the self-loathing for those ten awful minutes before you fall asleep at night.

Cauliflower and Broccoli

In my tried and tested humble opinion, these two are the worst offenders and should be regarded with no more than a sidelong glance until well into a complacent long-term relationship.

Stir fry with soy sauce and scallions, then toss with shrimp and roasted cashews. Cauliflower is also great chopped into steaks and roasted in olive oil and curry spice. No matter how hard you squint they’ll never taste like real steak, but are still surprisingly palatable.

Maintain ur Gainz

Still hungry an hour after a meal? It’s probably because what you ate was low in fat or protein. If you want to feel fuller, flesh out a carb-heavy meal with one of these:

Avocado

Use a fork to smush it onto toast with freshly cracked pepper, or painstakingly lay a bunch of thin slices in a fan formation on top of any dish for an enviably photogenic meal.

Peanut Butter

A spoonful or two bulks up oatmeal and smoothies, but I find that licking it off my index finger works just as well. It can be added to curries to temper the spice, and is also the secret ingredient in many a champion chili recipe, although not anymore, I guess.

Eggs

Try frying one over-easy and adding it to a burger or on top of ramen. If runny egg yolks give you the heebie-jeebies, suck it up. No pun intended. A quintessential part of being a foodie is pushing the boundaries of your gag reflex. Besides, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Which brings us to…

Crickets

Yes, as in Mulan’s fraudulent talisman! Not just for iguanas anymore, these little guys have been a global food source for humans for centuries, though you wouldn’t know it based on the collective American grimace that surfaces at the thought of endophagy.

In 2013, the United Nations published a report on the sustainability of using insects to feed people and livestock, and US-based startup companies jumped at the opportunity to hop into the market.

Consumers can now purchase edible cricket products in the form of flour, protein bars and chips. Skeptics, let’s face the facts: Japan, the Netherlands and Mexico all do it. Grossness is just a social construct.

#CONDIMENTHACKS

Sriracha

The gold standard in hot sauce, but only if we’re talking the rooster brand (formally Huy Fong). Hipsters love it, and when have they ever been wrong? If you still have doubts, consider the fact that you can google “sriracha” plus literally any other food and get approximately 3 bajillion hits.

Pesto

Use it as a marinade for chicken, drizzle it inside omelets or smooth it onto pizza dough before you add the red sauce. Like sriracha, this garlicky basil concoction could show up anywhere on my plate and I wouldn’t be mad about it. Except maybe the underside. That’s wasteful :/

Bragg’s Liquid Aminos

Sorry, FitFam, despite its confusing name this is not a protein supplement. It’s actually delicious, pure umami in a bottle. In flavor it’s a close cousin to soy sauce but with far less sodium, so you won’t feel like you just walked off the Mad Max set after eating it.