Vegetables, Smeshtables

You all know me well. You know I like to beat the evening rush at the dining hall. You know I take forever to tie my shoe laces. And you know I don't like vegetables. Even if you don't know me well, you still might be familiar with that last character quirk. I am open about my feelings towards the lowest of food groups. My host mother, however, is not exactly in the know.
Host Mother Judith buys only organic. She wakes up early every morning, goes to the market and hand-picks the freshest produce to whip up into a delicioso dinner later in the day. I should be grateful to partake of such wholesome nightly repasts, you say? (I seriously hope none of you would ever say a sentence like that). Well I am, but spinach has been a major player at dinner all week.
Spinach and I go way back. Back to that night at the dinner table when Mom practically force fed me the stuff, and I, in an act of defiance, promptly threw it all up. I've been slowly reintroducing the leafy green back into my meat-and-potatoes diet, but only in small doses, and only raw.
Tonight we opened with spinach and pumpkin soup. Hot and steaming. Puréed all together, like it was trying to trick me into thinking it was just a bowl of green goop. Which I'd rather eat. But you can't really tell that to the woman who is opening up her heart and home to you for the next three months.  
I swallowed my first spoonful. It was thick, it was fragrant, it was so so spinachy. Each new spoonful triggered my gag reflexes. And I couldn't even discretely spit a mouthful in my napkin, like I do back in the good ole' USA, because Judith's napkins are cloth.
I powered through it, though. In Italy, even a regular Monday night dinner is served in several courses. And my family couldn't start the next course until I finished that dang soup. These people were counting on me.
Finally, it looked as though I drained the bowl. "Are you feenished?" Judith asks. "Si, grazie."
She gets up and walks over to me, looking into my bowl. She picks it up, tilts it a little, then scrapes what's left of the soup up with my spoon and then sets it before me again. "Where I grew up, I always had to feenish all my soup."
Fine, okay, but where I grew up, being extravagantly wasteful is practically a pastime. But I'll feenish your dang soup.
And so I did. Or so I thought. She walks over again, inspects the bowl, and still finds something to scrape off the sides and into my well-worn spoon. The only thing that got me through that last spoonful was knowing that I already marked up my map with the locations of all the gelaterie in a three-mile radius.
Ah. Basta. Full. Of vegetables.
Am I now a carrot convert? No. But I will fake it until I make it. Potluck at my house in three months; I'm bringing the spinach dip.  

* Full Disclosure: the soup wasn't that bad. It helped that it was followed by steak.