Weird Veg Quiz IV

Dear class, today we are having a QUIZ!

Yes, your favorite! It's been awhile since we've had a weird vegetable mystery post, so to keep you on your toes, I'm posting this medley and you have 30 seconds to identify the 5 different veggies in this photo.

I'll give you some clues: two are temperate veggies and the other three are specific to sub/tropical regions, like Brazil, where I am at the moment.

Here's some inspirational music to play while you're thinking it over and writing down your bets and final answers. You get one life-line and losers have to send me their first-born tomatoes of the season (I will accept them both canned and fresh). Correct answers are displayed after the video.



Okay, ready?

The two give-away veggies to make you feel good about yourself are: beets and cucumbers.

The others are a bit trickier...

On the bottom edge are manioc chunks. Also known as cassava and yuca, it is a much-beloved tuber here in Brazil, mostly eaten boiled or French-fried, or in the form of a grainy-flour condiment known as farinha or farofa that gets toasted and sprinkled on beans, fish stews, or mixed up with bananas and eggs. I think it tastes like sand but is nevertheless strangely appealing.

I boiled the manioc shown above in salted water then peeled and tossed the chunks with a trickle of olive oil and a sprinkle more of salt. The skin is hard to peel, so it's best to boil it first, then skin after. Also, some kinds of manioc are poisonous when eaten raw, so I like to boil them for a long long time. The taste is like potato, only deeper somehow, more substantial, and ever so slightly sweet (or some other yet-to-be-named taste that lies far on the savory side of sweet).

There are some manioc plants growing right outside my hermit house in Rio, and their roots will be ready to harvest as soon as they get a foot or two taller. The spiky leaves bear a striking resemblance to California's most beloved barely il/legal cash crop.

 Next, the green sauteed chiffonade on the right may look like kale but—GOTCHA—it is in fact a dark leafy doppleganger: the more delicate taioba (tie-OH-bah), the giant leaf of a plant that's related to taro and that I posted about last year.

And finally, the most mysterious of all, so mysterious that even Brazilians at the farmers' market I went to last week were like, "Whhhaaaat, is that?!" (Que que é iiiiiisssso??):

TREE TOMATOES!!

What?? I know, they're so weird. 

Here's more info. Also known as tamarillos, these are tomato dopplegangers that grow on trees and taste slightly tangy but are sweet enough to enjoy raw (though some people add sugar and make a juice from them). The ones I got were a far cry from ripe because apparently they turn bright red or yellow-orange when ripe. These look almost like figs, though the gooey red central seeds remind me a bit of pomegranate. Not realizing these were still incredibly unripe, I tried one, which actually turned out to be quite tasty with easy-to-chew seeds (very soft, those tiny red pods). But thinking of them as tomatoes, I was surprised to find that the rind was too tough to bite into, so that I had to gnaw the yellow meat off as though they were tiny watermelon slices.

And now you're probably griping, "Heeyyyy, that's not fair, those aren't even vegetables," in which case I refer you to the official Weird Vegetables response to this objection, which is to point out that fruits are, in fact, a subset of vegetables, as vegetables are culturally defined as any "edible part of a plant," and fruits are biologically defined as coming from a flower and bearing an enclosed seed. For further explanation, I refer you to the now-seminal Lemon Cucumber post, the interview with WV on the KQED Bay Area Bites Blog, or this slightly embarrassing and potentially career-damaging video of me holding forth about fruits vs. vegetables after a couple glasses of wine and feeling very sweaty and dinner-partied and not entirely realizing I was being recorded at WV chef Leafy Heirloom's Dinner Discussion series, in which people working in food and art get together to talk about, well, food and art. While he serves a tasty dinner of mostly weird vegetables.




Okay, now let's tally up your marks. Tally ho!

0 correct: you need to go to the farmers' market and read this blog more
1 correct: pat yourself on the back with your forefinger. Now go make a salad.
2 correct: mildly respectable. You probably guessed beets and cucumbers, right?
3 correct: good, you have a discerning eye and some awareness about international weird vegetables, and maybe you've been reading this blog
4 correct: verrrrry impressive, companheiro/a. Have you spent time in sub/tropical climes?
5 correct: you are a scientist or a magician. or a farmer, which is a combination of both.

If you missed the previous quizzes, you can find them all here, plus an entertaining Obscure Veggies Quiz from Mental Floss that eventually leads you back home to Weird Vegetables.

Dropping Veggie Knowledge

So, the other day, during a routine procrastination check of the site meter, I had to do a double take when I noticed our daily hit count for June 21 was listed at an eye-popping 588 (it's usually around 70-80 per day). Conducting some basic cyber sleuthing, I tracked the sudden spike back to the online intellectual gymnasium known as Mental Floss (also in print!). Turns out that the topic of Monday's fun fact quiz was Obscure Veggies, and the final question borrows a mysterious veg photo from our very own WV Quiz the Third. I freely admit that I only answered 7 of 9 questions correctly, but that I did at least get that last one right. If I had known it all, I might have been forced to question the need for further weird vegetable research via this self-educational vehicle (aka blog).

Take a shot at flossing your mind and check out how many green bits you can get from between your folds of gray matter.

And here are our own WV quizzes I and II.

Weird Veg Quiz the Third

And what, pray tell, is this delightful morsel?
A candied fig?

A rare species of mushroom that appears only at the start of each new year?

Detritus from a particularly intense Care Bear Stare?

A guava-flavored fruit snack? Crunchy yet chewy...

The glistening eye of an albino dolphin?

A super nova preserved in vegetable form like some semi-precious stone?

Give up?

It's the wizened form of a watermelon radish. It's been sliced thinly and tossed with olive oil, salt, and pepper, along with purple, red, and yellow potatoes, turnips, and parsnips and roasted on a baking sheet in the 375-degree oven for 45 minutes.

Mmm. Root Chips. Waaay more addictive than Veggie Booty!

Remember the bright pink and pale green watermelon radishes of the fall?


These radishes were so fresh and fun-loving, before the heat of the oven, like Father Time, transformed them almost beyond recognition. What was once spicy and juicy has withered to a wrinkled, salted crisp, ready to become faintly sweet dust in your mouth and make way for the new. We bid you adieu! Adieu. Adieu...

Here are Veg Quiz I and II, if you missed them the first time around.

Separated at Birth: Serpentine Cucumber & Striped Zucchini

Hey kids! I've been huffing and puffing in mountain movie theaters and writing my brains into hominy for many many days now for various other commitments, but I'm squeezing out a little extra oompf before this week ends for a late summer version of Name that Vegetable. [Yes, in San Francisco we all agree that September is really summer.] Our winter-time pop quiz was the tricky Turnip or Rutabaga, but now you get to test your vegetable acumen by identifying which is the cuke and which the zuke in the above photo!

a brief diversion while you think...

sizzle sizzle.

that is a zucchini frying in a pan.

drizzle drizzle.

that is a cucumber being dressed for its salad.

Ding! Egg-timer's up. The one on the left gets sizzled and the right-hand looker gets drizzled. If you guessed correctly, go slice yourself a summer squash variant of your choice. If not, feel free to do the same. How else are you going to learn to identify things accurately?


I had thought the Armenian cucumber was the most curious of cukes besides that lemon doppelganger, but was intrigued by this slightly sweeter serpentine, which I'd never before laid eyes on, lying next to its paler Armenian brother at the Heirloom Organics stand at the Ferry Plaza market.

The striped zucchini lay not far away, and I put the two together in my basket because they gave me warm thoughts of these two black-and-white polka dot socks I have that originally come from different pairs and are almost identical if you don't look too closely. (One is a little more faded and baggier than the other, but secretly my favorite because I think it was worn by my sister as a moody teenager in the '80s.)

If you insist on inspecting them more minutely, here you go:


Both cucumbers and zucchini (Italian for "little squash"; Brits prefer the French "little squash," which is courgette) are members of the Cucurbitaceae or cucurbit family that includes squashes, melons, gourds, pumpkins, basically all manner of these round or elongated seeded creatures that creep along the garden floor with their hairy tendrils. The cucumber is shinier and juicier, and thus cooler than its denser zucchini neighbor, whose tougher flesh makes it not as enjoyable to eat raw.

If I were the mad botanist designing this couple's lovechild twinset, I would call them Cucchini and Zucumber. They would be charmingly sweet and agreeably juicy yet tough enough to withstand the worst taunts at school.

Turnip or Rutabaga?

Pop quiz, veggie heads. Rutabaga or turnip? Which is which in the above photo?

tick tock

tick tock

ding!

Decided? The bigger one is a rutabaga (right) and the smaller guys are turnips (left). If you correctly identified these specimens, then advance to Veggie Challenge #2: the radicchio vs. escarole blind taste test. According to Mark Bittman in his encyclopedic How to Cook Everything, an incredibly useful recipe resource that will save you hours of Internet filtering: "If you can tell the difference with your eyes closed between radicchio (seven dollars per pound) and escarole (fifty-nine cents a pound), you deserve a Julia Child award for Most Sophisticated Palate."

Incidentally, Bittman has a new book out called Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, which picks up the gauntlet that Michael Pollan threw down with The Omnivore's Dilemma (changed my life) and In Defense of Food (preaching to the choir for me at this point but still good) by combining the discussion of our bloated food system with practical guidelines and recipes for how to eat more sustainably and healthfully without fetishizing your food objects and spending your whole paycheck on two ears of corn and a lamb sausage. This book review by Laura Miller at Salon.com is worth reading not only for its use of the bizarrely intriguing term "snow jobs" (applied to diet books) but also for the way it aptly characterizes Bittman as a kind of everyman's foodie, the Joe Sixpack love child of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, one might say.


Returning to the veggies at hand, if you failed the quiz, get yourself to your next farmers' market or produce-heavy grocery store and examine the rutabagas side-by-side with the turnips. They aren't too different, but these root vegetables do belong to slightly different species, Brassica rapus (turnip) and Brassica napus (rutabaga). Turnips come in both Japanese and French varieties, the former round, white, and cute, the latter, purple-tinged and with a more tapered end (the ones pictured here) and are available pretty much all year. Rutabagas, on the other hand, hit their stride in the winter months, becoming sweeter in colder weather, and are generally deep purple and yellowish with rougher skin and tougher "meat" than the more delicate turnip. I'd put my money on the rutabaga in a street brawl.

Provenance gets a little more colorful with the rutabaga, which is thought to be a cabbage-turnip love child——there's a possible analogous loop back to Bittman somewhere in there but I'm in no mood to dig for it at the moment——originating in 17th-century Bohemia. After that, this starchy staple gets associated with Sweden, nicknamed "swede" in Commonwealth nations, while "rutabaga" derives from the Swedish "rotabagge," meaning "root ram." Yes, root ram. It did just get better. Lest I overwhelm you with excitement, rutabagas/swedes/root rams are also known as "snaggers" in northeast England. How did I get so knowledgeable? By surfing here and here.

If you're wondering how to cook these earthy creatures, let the potato be your guide. I would roast them sliced up, maybe peeled, tossed with salt and olive oil, at 375°F for about 30-40 min. until browned around the edges and soft in the middle, or I would simmer them in a soup. Below, I made a gratin with one layer each of turnips, potatoes, and rutabagas. I had the rutabaga layer on top, but next time I would make it the bottom because it's tougher than the other two and so less inviting as the first bite into your mouth.

Turnip, Rutabaga, Potato Gratin (inspired by the recipe from Chez Panisse Vegetables)

Preheat oven to 375°F. Get together a handful each of turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes, enough to make one or two layers each in a 9-in. round or 9x12-in. baking dish. Wash and peel if you don't like skins or they're too scaly. Then slice turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes into thin, 1/4-in. rounds, and layer them in the dish as below. Season each layer with salt and pepper.
Pour a mixture of half cream (or milk) and half chicken stock (about 2 cups, but varies depending on the size of your dish) to just cover the rounds. Bake uncovered for 40 minutes. If you have some parmesan or gruyere lying around, grate some over the top to bake for the last 5-7 minutes.


I must confess that my final product in this instance came out a little funky, since I ran out of milk and got all MacGyvered out by using sour cream swirled with salted water. I also ran out of patience and energy while slicing the larger rutabaga, which ended up in savagely chopped, irregular blob shapes. I trust that yours will be much more pleasing.

Note: This post was inspired by a debate I had with an always friendly and gracious cashier at Bi-Rite over whether my purchase was a rutabaga or turnip (I was right; it was a rutabaga, though I was helped by the signage when I picked it out). Bi-Rite Market is a neighborhood grocery store in San Francisco's Mission district that specializes in organic and local products and that I usually denounce for its high prices, though its local produce is actually surprisingly affordable. Also, they're always super nice when I ask really specific and probably annoying questions about cuts of pork or call up and have them check on exactly what kind of beets are in stock and at what price.