mexicola avocado

this one was a winner. it's a small, very thin-skinned avocado. the skin is so thin the girl at the farmer's market said you could eat it. i wouldn't recommend that - has an odd flavor that struck me as bad. tart, maybe? imagine the taste contrast between skin and fruit in plums or kumquats, but not delicious.



but the avocado flesh was good. it tastes more like it came off a tree than your usual buttery avocado. slightly more fruity. and it was so creamy. it made the best avocado on toast. it spread out easily like peanut butter, and was great with sea salt and semi-grainy bread.

chicory endive

black radish

black radishes are one of my food goals for this project. i've been seeing them a lot in fancy food articles. don't think these are the same as the gigantic european ones they mention in the articles, but they were close enough to try.
in a word, they're woody. too firm for the salad i tried them in raw (see next post). and not as flavorful as an everyday radish.

they were really interesting cooked, though. tried just the radish part from this recipe: http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Duck-Foie-Gras-in-Classic-Apicius-Style-in-Sweet-and-Sour-Sauce-with-Black-Radish-Confit it brought out a cabbage flavor in the radishes. kind of like chewy warm coleslaw in a sticky sweet sauce. i don't even know how to describe it. different, but not bad. i kept eating pieces trying to come up with a description. it was a little like that sweet broccoli salad with bacon and raisins they have (had?) at souplantation.

black radish confit:

watermelon radish

as featured on iron chef america, white house edition. how cool is that? they're very sweet and mild and eminently edible. and pretty, too.

broccoli rabe

also known as rapini.

poor broccoli rabe didn't get a fair chance. it's on the list for a do-over. the raw leaf i tried tasted fresh, like a lighter version of your standard greens. seemed like it could be tasty.

but when i started to cook the recipe, i only had half the required amount of broccoli rabe. i thought it would be ok and i'd end up with extra sauce, which is usually a good thing.

not in this case. here we learn that sauteing things in wine adds a very strong wine flavor. and doubling the wine makes an inedible wine flavor.

recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Broccoli-Rabe-with-Pine-Nuts-and-Raisins-233098

also, you have to really really trim these. they're uncomfortably woody even very far up the stalk.

jerusalem artichoke

also called sunchoke and sundry other things. apparently they're the root of a type of sunflower. they're sort of fractal looking. and also kind of like an organic game of jacks.

when eaten raw, they were sweet and crunchy with an unexpected hint of spice, sort of like jicama with a tiny bit of radish. they smelled part like the fridge (naturally, not from long storage) and part like artichoke. rather hard to cut. also, scrub well, because grit hides out in those nooks and crannies.

raw sunchokes:

fried plain, they were sweeter and slightly tender, but definitely al dente. my notes say the flavor was half artichoke, half cooked [something that got erased. sadness].

with tarragon and lemon, they tasted more like artichoke. http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/pan-roasted-sunchokes-artichoke-hearts-lemon-herb-butter.aspx i didn't pan roast because my oven's broken (still), and i just used sunchokes, but the sauce was fantastic anyway. i want to try it on pasta salad. i have exhaustive notes on the cooking process and recipe substitutions, but that feels like tmi.

this did not reheat well. yucky. texture was weird and the lemon flavor disappeared.

sunchokes cooked in a delicious sauce:

gujarati dal

gujarat is a place in india. and dal is lentils. sounds less fancy when explained that way, eh? the recipe is from saveur. i'll post the link later with a picture of the spices,
this dish taught me that i really don't like the smell of curry leaves. the taste of the dal was mild, but i couldn't get over the smell. it reminded me strangely of the smell of burnt cheddar cheese. (note: curry leaves are not included in the yellow curry powder they sell at the standard american grocery store. same name, different creature. i think it's a translational mix-up.)