Casaba Melon

The casaba melon looks like a yellow pumpkin in this picture, mostly because I have a crappy camera. All the food bloggers at BlogHer had fancy schmancy cameras that would make this casaba melon look so tasty you would leave rainbow colored drops of saliva on your computer screen. I have a point and shoot camera and little interest in digital photography, so this is what you get.

I like to say “casaba” and I liked eating the casaba melon. It tasted predictably melon-like, similar to a honeydew. It was easy to slice through, juicy, and perfectly ok. Not exceptionally good, but not bad either. I’ll probably stick to cantaloupe though. My cat, Krupke, loves to lick the rinds of cantaloupe, but could not be bothered to swipe his tongue across the casaba rind. Humans – thumbs up. Cats – paws down.

Pepino melon

I like to say “pepino,” but alas I did not like to eat the pepino melon, which did not look melon-like at all. I bit into it expecting a sweet, citrus fruit and had a soggy, cucumber experience instead. Wikipedia says it’s supposed to be sweet, so it’s possible my pepino was not ripe enough. I don’t care enough to try it again though, and this pepino landed in the trash after two bites. Next time I’ll just take a couple bucks out of my purse and rip them up to throw confetti off the balcony. That would surely be more fun.

Passion fruit

I’ve seen passion fruit on juice box labels and as a bubble gum flavor, but I’d never actually had a passion fruit. I bit into it expecting a sweet, citrus fruit and I had a sweet, citrus fruit experience. At least some fruits meet my expectations. It was a little messy though, like other passionate experiences. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) It’s always fun to eat purple foods too, like eggplant or purple cauliflower. Still, I’ll probably stick to buying whatever fruits are cheap and in season rather than buying exotic treats like this.

Yellow Plum

The yellow plum really did start out yellow, but turned a nice shade of red by the time I took a picture. It tasted like a plum. What I enjoyed most about the plum was that it came from Chile, which made me think of Kyle, (Hey, Kyle!) and how cool it is that blogging has allowed me to meet people in countries that export tropical fruits to the US.

Assorted Squash

Last fall I tried all of the squash pictured above – an acorn squash, a gold acorn squash, a white acorn squash and a delicata. They all tasted like squash. That’s why I didn’t blog about it.

In the past two months I’ve desperately been searching the produce section for fruits and vegetables that I haven’t tried. I was hoping some mutant product of Argentina would pop up between the oranges and the apples so I wouldn’t have to buy this…

Rutabaga

A rutabaga. Anything but the rutabaga.

It’s certainly not the most attractive of the root vegetables. During my previous trips to the produce section I would always spy it in the corner, between the butternut and acorn squash. It loomed over me, waiting patiently, my dark destiny. Finally, in a desperate grab for blogging material, I purchased one.

Then I let it sit in my fresher drawer for a month.

Yes, literally a month. I would open up the drawer, spot the grey, waxy, rock in the corner, and then I’d grab a peach or a pear and mutter, “I should really cook that before it goes bad.” I did this week after week. Waiting. But the damn rutabaga refused to go bad. Damn you, root vegetables, and your long longevity! I looked at the rutabaga last night and realized I wasn’t sure I’d know if it had gone bad. Was that white stuff a layer of wax or was it mold growing along the skin? I took out a paring knife and started to slice into it and was relieved to see that the inside of the rutabaga was a much more attractive and normal-looking orange color. So, I cracked and finally looked up instructions on how to cook rutabagas. I peeled it, cubed it, and boiled it in a skillet with some margarine, salt, pepper and a bit of chili powder and brown sugar.

It was good! I was shocked! It tasted sort of like potato. I suspect I enjoyed the meal not so much because of the rutabaga itself, but because the rutabaga served as a delivery device for the margarine, salt, pepper, chili powder and brown sugar. I’ve noticed there are lots of vegetables that can be used as a bland, base, filler ingredient which you eat solely so you can coat them in the tasty stuff that you really want to eat: celery and cream cheese dip, squash covered in butter and garlic, zucchini dipped in hummus. Add rutabaga to the list.

It also gave me an excellent opportunity to use my new skillet, retail value $60.00, but purchased at Marshalls for only $24.99. I walked in there looking for a pair of jeans and walked out with cookware, a huge metal wall hanging, and two pretty shoe boxes.

As for the Lick the Produce series, I might be able to hit a Mexican grocery store next week. If not, I’m going to have to look up a local Asian grocer, because I am completely out of material here. I ate a rutabaga for God’s sake.

Seckel pears

Food is so much cuter when it’s miniaturized. That’s why I buy baby carrots instead of their full-sized cousins. When I saw an eight pack of pears each the size of a baby’s fist, I snatched them up. These itty-bitty pears are also known as sugar pears, and after I bit into one it was clear why. They’re very sweet. Their small size makes them great for portion control too. I ate one or two at a time when I just wanted a small snack. I’d buy them again, but I got them at the late, great Sunflower Market, so I’ll have to find another sugar pear dealer before that happens. I’ll comfort myself in the mean time with this site made by some people who are really bananas about pears.

Red Pummelo

The red pummelo could also be used as a medicine ball during my “Strength and Endurance” class at the YMCA. It’s huge! I placed a bottle cap next to it in this photo so you can get a sense of scale. I cut it in half and was surprised at how thick the skin was. I bit into the flesh of the fruit and felt a bit disappointed that it tasted like a grapefruit. Then I took another bite and realized this was much sweeter than a grapefruit. Then I took another bite and decided I would never buy a grapefruit again if I could get a red pummelo instead. I also suddenly regretted not buying the grapefruit spoons I saw on clearance at Target the week before. I talked myself out of the purchase when I tried to think of the last time I’d eaten a grapefruit and couldn’t remember. According to this site the modern grapefruit was developed from the pummelo. I haven’t seen this in the store since I bought it a couple weeks ago, so I might just be stuck with grapefruits for now. Come to think of it, why are grapefruits called grapefruits? They don’t taste or look like grapes.

Kumquats

I love to say the word “kumquat.” Kumquat! I think it’s the “kwa” sound in the second syllable and how it’s followed by that snappy “t.” The kumquat is a cute little fruit too, though the label on the box features a somewhat demented illustration anthropomorphizing it:

As the label says, you eat the whole thing, peel and all. The peel has a somewhat sweet taste and the flesh is tart. It was fun popping kumquats in my mouth, but they weren’t that extraordinary. I wouldn’t turn them down, but I won’t feel unjustly robbed of their presence in the off season. It’s so much fun to say the word “kumquat” that I doubt any taste experience could compare.

Pluot

Back in August I was passing the peaches when I saw a speckled, plum-like fruit. I examined the sticky label and discovered my Kroger had started stocking Dinosaur Eggs. Wow, I thought dinosaurs were extinct! These must be worth millions! Yet, my local supermarket was selling the extinct eggs for less than 6 figures per pound, though they didn’t specify what breed they were. Triceratops? Tyrannasaurus Rex? Upon further research, I learned the Dinosaur Egg is one of at least 13 varieties of the pluot, a cross between a plum and an apricot. Don’t confuse them with the aprium or the plumcot. While I loved the creative marketing, the pluot tasted like a plum to me, just with a cuter name.

Broccoflower

After I’d tried orange cauliflower and purple cauliflower, I was comforted by the fact that their demon cousin Broccoflower® was a color more frequently occurring in nature. This combination creature of broccoli and cauliflower is also a good source of Vitamin C and folate, if the package is to be believed. The word “Broccoflower®” is a trademark of Tanimura & Antle. So it’s like the words Kleenex or Xerox or if you want to keep talking food, it’s like Derby Pie, a chocolate, walnut, bourbon pie trademarked by Kern’s Kitchen of Kentucky and named for the Kentucky Derby. You’ll never find a recipe for Derby Pie in a cookbook because of the copyright issues. Instead people rename their Derby Pie recipes something like Pegasus Pie or May Day Pie even though everyone knows it’s a Derby Pie. Just like everyone at the office knows you’re having a Christmas Party even if you call it a Holiday Celebration.

But, I wasn’t eating Derby Pie (sadly enough), I was eating Broccoflower®. And it tasted like cauliflower. It was a let down, really. Mad food scientists are going to all this trouble to combine fruits and vegetables and the results end up tasting no different than their parents.

Ugli Fruit

That is an ugli fruit. I’ll give you three guesses as to why it’s called that. Green, wrinkly people are automatically disqualified. The ugli fruit is from Jamaica and is also called the Uniq fruit. It’s a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine. Mine was a bit larger than a grapefruit, though the label suggested I split it in half like one. When I got it open, I realized it was much easier to just peel it apart like an orange. It also tasted like an orange, just more bitter and tart. It was like an orange dressed up in a frumpy, green suit. If someone had served the pulp to me on a plate, I would have never guessed it was an ugli fruit. The picture on Wikipedia is yellow though, so perhaps mine wasn’t ripe enough.

All in all, the hybrid fruits didn’t seem worth the extra cost I paid for them. They were novelty items that were more fun to buy and look forward to eating than to actually eat. If you’re going to get a hybrid, you should probably stick to a car.

Cherimoya

Sometimes I do not know their names. Thank you to everybody who told me that the strange, green fruit I picked up at the grocery store is a cherimoya. They are a very popular fruit that have several web sites dedicated to them and Mark Twain called them “deliciousness itself.” Still, I’d never seen or heard of them before. I’m evidently out of the fruit loop. I don’t recognize any of the musicians in the Top 10 anymore and I cannot identify a somewhat popular and beloved custard fruit. I am old and out of touch with the world.

The cherimoya is described as having a creamy, custard flavor and it lived up to its reputation. It was very yummy, sweet with a tart after taste. My only complaint is that there are a lot of hard brown seeds that I had to pick out. As shown in the picture below, after I ate all the white stuff they took up one fourth of the remaining shell.

Sometimes if I’m feeling lazy, I will just eat the seeds in a watermelon or a grape, but biting into these seeds would have cost me some serious dental work. Someone should task the genetic engineers to breed a seedless version.

Dragon Fruit – Kiwano

The dragon fruit looks like a doggy toy. Or a strange aquatic creature. And the Google image search for “dragon fruit” makes me wonder if what I ate was a real dragon fruit. I conducted a fruit autopsy and the insides look fairly different.

The dragon fruit is also supposed to be mildy sweet, but when I stuck a spoon into its guts and put it in my mouth it tasted like – slimy, cucumber, seeds! It was like someone had taken the most tasteless part of a cucumber with the most disgusting texture and injected it into a doggy toy. I actually threw this out without eating the whole thing, a first in Lick the Produce history. I don’t know if what I ate was a dragon fruit or not, but I’m never eating it again.

ETA: Thanks to Lesley and Tracy for revealing this is actually a kiwano!

Feijoa

When I did a search for “fiejoa” I returned almost no results, making me wonder if I’d picked up some completely obscure fruit. Then I realized that I’d spelled it wrong because “feijoa” is evidently too good to obey the “I before E” rule. What a rebel. According to Wikipedia, it is also known as a Pineapple Guava or a Guavasteen.

The feijoa is a tiny, has soft flesh and a sweet smell. So it’s the fruit equivalent of a supermodel. It was very fragrant and tasted as good as it smelled, like a cross between a banana and a pear. I don’t eat supermodels, but I’d eat a feijoa again.

Acorn Squash

The acorn squash does sort of look like an acorn. When I picked it up at the grocery store, I had an urge to hold it up to my face with both hands and twitch my nose like a giant squirrel. However, I did not dig up the linoleum and bury it in the produce section. Instead, I just split it open with my giant knife and scooped out the insides before baking it in a pan of water.

I scraped out the insides and served it with some margarine, salt and pepper and, wow, it was pretty damn good. I wasn’t expecting too much from a squash, but it was fairly tasty. The acorn squash is a bit high on the glycemic index though, so I won’t be eating this too frequently.

Pomegranate

Last time I was moaning about how I couldn’t do a Kate Bush themed LTP entry because there were no guavas or sultanas or pomegranates around here. So what do I find at my local grocer’s the very next week? A bin full of pomegranates.

The pomegranate is as difficult to eat as it is to spell. I still have to look it up in Webster’s online every time and before eating it I read some directions. First you cut off the flowery top part.

Then you score it into four sections.

Next you place it in a bowl of water to soak, and then rip open the four sections, revealing all the seeds nestled in a white cocoon of… stuff.

You want to eat the seeds, not the white stuff. So you have to pick out the seeds which fall to the bottom of the water while the white stuff floats. Then you skim the white stuff off the top and eat the seeds.

By the time I was done with this, I felt like I’d disarmed a dirty bomb. The seeds were fairly sweet and tasty, but I wouldn’t consider them worth all the work. Just hand me an apple instead. I prefer fruits I can just bite into and I know how to spell. I also hear pomegranate juice stains pretty badly, so don’t attempt this wearing your Sunday best.

Orange Cauliflower

After trying purple cauliflower last month, I decided to give the orange variety a try too. According to Wikipedia it contains 25 times the level of Vitamin A as white cauliflower. Once again I sprayed it with olive oil, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and roasted it in the oven at 425 degrees for half an hour, turning it once halfway through. And once again I took it out, ate it and decided it tasted just like regular cauliflower. I guess Vitamin A doesn’t have much flavor.

In retrospect, it would have been best if I bought a head of each color of cauliflower, cooked them all, and then compared the tastes side by side to catch any small variances in flavor. However, I would have been up to my ears with heads of cauliflower. I try to eat my veggies, but there is only so much beta-carotene a girl can take. The cashier at the grocery store probably would have given me an odd look too, forcing me to spin some story about making a vegetable mosaic for art class. It would be easier than explaining what a blog is.

Halloween is a little over a month away though, so this orange food could be useful in creating holiday themed food. It’s healthier than candy corn, for sure.

Golden Kiwi

After trying kiwifruit last month, I decided to give the golden variety a try too. (This post is in danger of becoming a remake of my last Lick the Produce Section post, like the Americanized version of a British TV show. Blimey, should I insert some foreign slang, mate?) Eve and Jill sang the praises of the golden kiwifruit in the comments and I liked that it was significantly less hairy than its cousin. I took a bite and – Oh my God – soooo good. The golden kiwi is softer and squooshier inside than the regular kiwi. It has a texture more like an orange. It’s also sweeter and less tart than the green kiwi. I will definitely be getting these again. I also like how the name “golden kiwi” reminds me of a Gold or Platinum credit card. It’s not just a kiwi, it’s a Golden kiwi. I feel like my credit limit increased just by eating it.

Papaya

When I hear the word “papaya” I start singing the Kate Bush song “Eat the Music“:

Take a papaya

With sticky fingers

If I had access to guavas, sultanas, and pomegranates, I could do an entire Kate Bush themed Lick the Produce Section post! I don’t though, so we’ll just have to settle for the papaya part.

After I bit into the waxy, bitter skin of a mango, I now properly research how to eat new fruits. I was surprised to discover that the papaya had seeds in the center and more closely resembled a cantaloupe than a huge pear, which is what it looks like on the outside. Unlike Kate Bush’s suggestion, I did not rip it to pieces with sticky fingers, but used my big, shiny knife to split it in half. The papaya itself was sweet and tasty and I’d definitely eat it again, but I think it’s a bit pricier than the melons around here. The seeds were bitter and can evidently used as a garnish, but I just used them to garnish my Hefty bag in the trash closet. According to Wikipedia the seeds are also “anti-inflammatory and analgesic, and they are used to treat stomachache and fungal infections.” Well, how fancy! If I ever get athlete’s foot I’ll just stock up on my tropical fruit

Mango

When I think of mangoes, I think of the Gauguin painting Woman with mango. Typing that title makes it sound like another recipe from the cannibal’s cookbook. I opted to eat the mango raw. However, if I had taken a closer look at Gauguin’s painting I would have realized I should have waited until it turned red to do so. Instead, I got out my big knife and tried hacking into a green mango. I got about an inch into it and felt like I’d gotten my workout for the day. I checked the wikipedia article on mangoes and realized my mistake, but by that time it was too late. If I left my mutilated mango to ripen on the counter it would just have gotten moldy. I finished cutting out a wedge anyway, bit into it and it was about as bad as you’d think unripened fruit would be. I threw it out for the trash flies to feast on and bought another mango a couple weeks later.

This time I waited for it to turn red and soft and bit right into it. That was mistake number two. If I had finished reading that wikipedia article I would have discovered that you’re not supposed to eat the skin. It’s like biting right into an orange or chewing on watermelon rind. In fact, there is a fancy schmancy way you are supposed to cut a mango to get out all the good, fleshy orange stuff. After all those mishaps, I finally ate the damn mango already. It was tart, somewhat lemony or limey, but sweeter. I’d certainly eat one again, now that I now how to do it properly.

I checked Eat Fresh, Stay Healthy, a book about fruits and veggies that some kind reader suggested (thank you kind reader!), which also has the fugliest cover of any book I have ever seen ever in all my life, and it said mangoes are the “number-one consumed fruit in the world.” They just don’t show up in the US that much due to various boring importation reasons I won’t get into. I had no idea they were so popular, especially considering how hard it was for me to eat one. Go figure.

Kiwi

I have had kiwi fruit before, but I had never bought one in my adult life because it was brown and fuzzy. Kiwi skin reminds me of shag carpeting and I’ve never had a desire to chomp on the carpet. Avoiding kiwi fruits was stupid though because, yum, they are delicious! After my experience with the mango I looked up information on the kiwi to be sure it was okay to just bite into it like an apple. Usually kiwi is served sliced up, but that would mean I’d have to clean my knife afterwards and I am always looking for ways to cut down on dirty dishes. Kiwi is now one of my favorite fruits and I’m definitely going to put it into high rotation in my lunch bag, weird fuzzy skin be damned.

Purple Cauliflower

When I saw the purple cauliflower and orange cauliflower heads in the produce section, I thought they had set it in water with purple food coloring. In grade school we did the same thing with white carnations to color their petals with streaks of purple. I didn’t know why anyone would turn cauliflower purple or orange, but the oddness appealed to me and I needed a new vegetable to try, so I grabbed the purple head because I thought purple was a slightly weirder color than orange.

When I researched my purchase, I discovered that the coloring was natural. “The purple color is caused by the presence of the antioxidant group anthocyanin, which can also be found in red cabbage and red wine.” I roasted this in the oven with olive oil, salt and pepper like I usually cook cauliflower and it tasted just like normal cauliflower. Maybe true taste connoisseurs would catch slight variances in flavor, but if you’d blindfolded me I doubt I would have been able to tell what color the cauliflower was. While the purple coloring was fun, I think I’ll stick to the white stuff for now. If I stick it in a pool of food coloring I bet I can turn it any color I want to.

Apricots

Apricots started showing up in the grocery bins this month, so I grabbed one. The cute, tiny, yellow fruit was sweet and juicy, but I couldn’t help thinking it resembled a plum or a peach in sweetness and delivery system. They are all roughly, spherical fruits with pits in the center that could chip a tooth if I bit into them incorrectly. It’s like comparing 80′s hair bands. You’ve got your Bon Jovi, your Poison, and your Def Leppard, but can you really tell that much of a difference between them through the haze of AquaNet hairspray? Perhaps if I were eating these fruits fresh off the tree I would notice more of a difference. Instead, I eat them after they’ve been shipped from some other state or nation. There certainly are differences in tastes and textures between all these fruits. But an apricot isn’t as shockingly different from a plum than it is from, say, an apple, if we’re comparing apples and apricots.

Donut Peach

It’s a donut! No, it’s a peach! No, it’s a peach that is shaped like a donut. Sorry, no sprinkles and icing included. The sticker says it is a white peach by Saturn. Wow, import taxes from Saturn must be astronomical. I don’t know if this peach naturally grows in this shape or it is some twisted feat of genetic engineering. If it’s the latter, I’m looking forward to the day when our fruit comes in a variety of shapes and even letters and we can spell out naughty words in the produce section. During Valentine’s Day they could sell heart-shaped peaches.

The donut shape of this peach was really handy. Typically when I eat a peach, juice starts running down my hand and past my wristwatch. Sometimes it sprays my shirt. I realize I could just cut it into pieces, but that would require a knife and pre-planning and I just like to grab a peach and go. I just ate this peach like a donut and the sticky hand factor was reduced to almost 0%. Thank you genetic engineers! It also tasted, well, just peachy!

Green onions

Don’t worry, I didn’t start snacking on these raw or try to steam them in the microwave. I used them as a garnish in my egg muffins. Strangely, I’d only used white onions and red onions, but Al Gore must have had an affect on my because I’ve now gone green. Not much else to say other than they added a nice zing of flavor, were easy to chop, and freeze well. Oh, and after the turnip they’re the other veggie that reminds me of Super Mario Brothers 2.

White Asparagus

Finally! A vegetable that includes instructions on the label! Thank you, white asparagus, for realizing I don’t know which end of you is up.

Asparagus is one of the foods that I was sure I hated, though I could not remember ever eating it. It was like knowing gravity would cause me to fall off a building. No one had to tell me, I just knew this. Asparagus = bad. Undoubtedly some childhood experience with the vegetable convinced me forever that it was nasty and the green sticks should never be stuck in my mouth. However, I’m starting to run out of vegetables in the market that I haven’t eaten, so I thought I’d give the white variety a try. And I’m glad I did.

The taste of the asparagus was a bit too bitter for me to truly like, but I loved the texture. So crunchy! Someone in the “weird stuff you’ve eaten” thread said they used to eat Styrofoam peanuts. The asparagus reminded me of that, but in a tasty, non-toxic way. I think part of the reason I love cereal so much is that I love crunching on it. I went to summer camp once with a girl who had grown up without a taste of smell, which also greatly reduced her sense of taste, so many of her favorite foods were determined by texture. When I met her, she’d recently had surgery that gave her back her sense of smell, which wrecked a bit of havoc on her life when she tasted cupcakes and chocolate for the first time. In her dorm room I saw a chocolate Hostess cupcake on the top shelf of the closet with a post-it note attached that said “Do not eat.” That seemed very odd to me because if I was going to buy a cupcake I was going to damn well eat it, probably fast enough that I wouldn’t have time to write any post-it notes. I later found out she was bulimic. I always wondered if her eating disorder was triggered by her newfound sense of taste. It must have been amazing to discover that sense, like suddenly being able to see in color after viewing the world in black and white all your life. You’d probably want to eat everything you’d eaten all over again. But sadly you might discover some of your favorite outfits don’t actually match and that asparagus, while crunchy, doesn’t taste as good as cupcakes.

Radishes, Redux

In my last edition of Lick the Produce Section, I steamed some radishes because that’s what AllRecipes.com told me to do. Unlike the asparagus, the radishes did not come with instructions. Many of you informed me I might like radishes better as a garnish on a salad or mixed in with cottage cheese with some salt and pepper. You were right. Radishes do make a tasty garnish. And they’ve been in the fridge for awhile now without hosting a mold party, which scores bonus points with me.

Parsnips

A parsnip looks like an albino carrot. Could this be the work of Bunnicula, the vampire rabbit who sucks vegetables of their juice? It also looks like on organic baseball bat, so if ever an intruder were to break into my apartment while I was raiding the fridge, I could probably grab a parsnip and beat him death with it. Now that’s a handy root vegetable!

After taking this home from the grocery store I looked up its glycemic index rating and freaked out a little when I discovered it was 97. The glycemic index is a measure of how quickly a food is digested and how fast it raises your blood sugar levels. A spoonful of sugar rates at 100. So at first glance it looked like I might as well be chewing on raw sugar cane as snacking on a parsnip. However, while the GI measures your response per gram of carbohydrate in the food, it doesn’t measure how many carbs are actually in that food. That’s what the glycemic load is for. The GL multiplies the glycemic index by the percent of carbs in the food, and luckily the GL for a parsnip is only 10. For comparison, a baked potato scores around a 17. *sigh of relief* Also, why does eating have to involve so much math? Because I love to eat pi, that’s why! (har, dee, har, har. ? jokes never get stale.)

I sliced up the parsnip and roasted it in the oven. I might have sprinkled some spices on there, but I can’t remember because this was weeks ago. I do remember that the parsnip was pretty tasty, kind of sweet but crunchy. I’d definitely eat one again, though I might keep a spare in the fresher drawer to beat off vampire bunnies.

Radishes

When I steamed the radishes in the microwave and they made the water a pretty pink color. They also did not go bad even though I stored them in my fridge for a week and a half. And that’s about all the nice things I have to say about radishes.

I’m not too crazy about that name to begin with. A “radish” sounds like some anti-biotic resistant mutant strain of a rash. I can just see a doctor telling some poor patient, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, that’s not just a rash you have on your arm, it’s a RADISH!” *cue dramatic strings*

I tried seasoning the radishes with some salt, but they still tasted somewhat bitter. The only thing that might make them more palatable is to drench them in other seasonings and butter. I can’t see myself ever having an incessant radish craving. They reminded me a bit of the turnips actually. If I had just returned from 40 days starving in the desert and stumbled upon a radish garden, I would eat them happily, but otherwise I’d pick another vegetable first. They might work better just as a garnish on a salad instead of a main meal in themselves.

ETA: Okay, evidently steaming radishes is really weird. I promise to eat them raw from now on. Y’all can stop telling me I’m a weirdo now.

Fish

Okay, I realize fish aren’t located in the produce section. I’ve never seen a fish garden with little fishy heads poking out of the dirt. That would make an awesome surrealistic painting though, or a cool gag to play on someone with a vegetable garden after buying a dozen plastic fish at the dollar store. Regardless, I wanted to mention that I’ve been trying some new fish. Why? Because there was a sale, of course!

Recently I’ve eaten flounder and tilapia and ocean perch, as well as an old favorite of mine, orange roughy (which in a blatant display of false advertising is NOT orange). Is it just me, or do most fish taste the same? They’re like the tofu of the ocean, they just take on the flavor of whatever you serve them with, be it lemon juice or a feta and spinach spread. Granted, salmon has a distinct taste, and I suspect there are other types of fish that have their own distinct flavor, like catfish or bass perhaps. However, if you’d served me a bite of each of these three fish I really wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. There may be many fish in the sea, but I can’t tell them apart. However, they have those good omega-3 oils and they don’t taste bad, so as long as they aren’t full of mercury I’ll be happy to keep munching on their tails.