Food Adventure

It's well established that I like to eat.

A lot.

I also get bored. A lot. And I hate eating the same things over and over. This extended-winter-will-it-ever-be-spring season has me in a food rut. It's not warm enough to move into light, crisp summer food, but it's not cold enough to continue eating all that heavy, hot winter stuff either.

So, in order to shake things up a bit, I like to take a trip through the produce and ethnic food departments and see what I can find that's new and unusual.

A couple of weeks ago, I brought home a fennel bulb. I'd heard that raw fennel was a palette cleanser between courses. After stumping the Pick N Save cashier (which I secretly love to do as a former grocery store checker who had to memorize all of the produce codes in the days before bar scanners and a sticker on everything), I took it home and sliced it up.


This week, my cart held jicama, rice noodles and dried persimmons.




The jicama is not really new--we eat it a lot. I took it to work today and discovered that not everyone was familiar.

I like to peel it, slice it into french fry shapes, let it sit in lime juice and sprinkle it with salt and/or some kind of red pepper spice ... like Tajin, cayenne, Mrs. Dash Southwest or even normal taco seasoning.


The rice noodles aren't that exotic, either. I'd just never used them before. Tonight I stir fried some leftover raw veg, soaked the noodles in hot water for 10 minutes, made a quick soy/fish sauce/chicken stock/sugar "gravy" and tossed it all together with some leftover pork loin. It was freaking awesome.




Persimmons? What the heck is a persimmon. Apparently it's a fruit that looks kind of like what would happen if an orange and a tomato had a baby. Five big dried slices contain 100 calories and they made a really good snack today.

What's your latest Food Adventure?