Sweeten Using Pure Plant Sugar

 Render down vegetable stock, boiling it dry, and then brown it to taste. The browner you make it, the stronger the flavour. If it still dissolves in water, it's not burnt yet. This stuff is plenty sweet unless you've been blasting your palate with industrially refined sugar. I tried to find out what non-independent-rediscoverers call this, but it's unclear. Sucs? Sauce base? Fond? Considering how sticky the gunk is, I think it's caramel, but made of non-fructose saccharides.

 It becomes quite dark before all the way black. At low heat it regularly tolerates forgetting the time. When I get distracted, normally all that happens is I find out it takes longer to burn than I feared. Exception: highly starchy sources like peas are more delicate.

 When you boil vegetables, the water turns green. This is a substantial part of the plant's vitality. Idiots, some of which I knew very well indeed, throw out this water. I decided to boil it down and precipitate the solutes so I could eat them. Turns out doing so is delectable. I often use water volume as a timer, listening for the sound of the cooking to change instead of a mechanical ding. More water => more cooked. It sizzles a bit before it's completely dry.

 I've never done it without salt. If you try it and it doesn't work, then it's true: there's some good reason stock is traditionally salty. Perhaps veggie stock wants to coalesce around salt crystals. Nice salty stock is delicious anyway. I sometimes think of it as preindustrial saltwater toffee because satire. 

 

 I like vegetables. I will often enjoy them raw. Since I get frozen vegetables for various reasons, I will often simply suck on a veggie like a frozen treat. Thawing it first is a waste of time. Having regular raw veggies also keeps the gut bacteria up to date, radically enhancing digestion.

 Steamed or boiled vegetables are awful, though. They taste bad because they are bad - my reading tells me you can't absorb their virtues and vitality. The solution is the browning I describe above, plus added saturated fat. Lard, tallow, butter, maybe coconut. Some Karen or AWFL will absolutely tell you it's unhealthy, but it only forms the cyclohexanes if you burn it, whereupon it starts tasting bitter and stops being water-soluble. Then, again, it tastes bad because it is bad - although not seriously so. Only a problem if you end up burning it every day. It's fine to have some charcoal now and then.  

 You can also do sweet-and-sour with a bit of vinegar, essentially making salt-and-vinegar chips but healthy instead of empty or poisoned with seed oils. The only downside is the vinegar will take away the emerald green of the vegetables and make them wilted-coloured instead.

 If I'm cooking rice, after rendering down and browning the stock, I simply add water as usual and infuse the rice with the now highly flavourful gunk. Again I assume this is a thing already but I don't know what normal people call it.

 The gunk pairs at least as well with pork as pineapple does, for the same reason as pineapple. I deglaze the pan using the pork's own juices. Removing all added water is the noticeably superior option. Meat can absolutely be caused to taste dry by having too much water in it.
 Pork without some kind of flavouring, such as vegetable stock, is basically inedible. This is probably because unsauced pork is bad for you. Meanwhile, cooking the pork directly in the fond or whatever it's called incorporates the sauce directly into the meat.

 You could try browning the vegetables directly, but this seems unnecessarily laborious. Leaching out the stock first makes it easy - you can just ignore it as long as there's water left - and nearly chemical-lab consistent. The precipitate has a perfectly controlled amount of hydration, and browns and dehydrates based solely on absorbed energy. That is, it happens faster if it's hotter, so you can control it finely if you do it cooler. If it's almost but not quite where you want it, try turning the heat off and using residual energy to finish it.