December Daily: new things

[resonant]

runpunkrun - "a new thing you tried"

I had a CSA membership this summer, which meant trying a lot of new foods.



- Purple kohlrabi -- well, you have to peel it really thickly, because the outer bit is fibrous, like what you sometimes get in broccoli stems. It makes my mouth absolutely panic, like the monkey in my brain thinks I have a mouthful of spiders or something.

- So much kale, so many varieties -- to my taste, kale turns out to be improved by being blanched and frozen and then thawed out and cooked. Maybe I just haven't been cooking it enough in the past. (Years ago I served it to the family once, and after extensive chewing I said, "If I had cooked this a little longer, it would have been more tender," and the kidlet said darkly, "Kale knows nothing of tenderness.") Also, if you put red Russian kale in beef stew, it tastes great but turns the liquid an unsettling shade of purple.

- Celeraic -- looks like Vegetable Cthulhu. Smells like a sharper version of celery. To my taste, needs to be cut up really small, because a mouthful of it is unfamiliar and unsettling.

- Kabocha squash -- At one point I had a kabocha, an acorn squash, a butternut squash, and a pie pumpkin all at the same time, and I really don't like winter squash all that much, so I figured I'd roast them all together and freeze them to use for pie or pumpkin bread. So naturally I took the opportunity of doing a blind taste test. Kabocha was the clear winner for both sweetness and smoothness. They look like someone did an oil painting of a pumpkin without ever seeing a pumpkin, based only on descriptions by preschoolers.




Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.



14. isis and clevermanka and trobadora - longhand?!
15. china_shop - Guardian as described by someone who only knows it via social media
16. kiezh following up with - "What have you heard about MDZS/The Untamed, and what did you think of what you heard?"
17. ride4ever's birthday prompt - "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."
18. mific - "the genderswap trope where a character's gender is changed. Yes? No? Maybe?"
19. runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
20. minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
21. hypertwink - "21. Now that you've come back, is there a fandom that you want to dip your toe into? (Follow up: Are you apprehensive/excited about it?)"
22.
23.
24. runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
25.
26. ride4ever - "for any dS or C6D pairing that you ship, how that ship is doing in 2020."
27. reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"
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30.
31.









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Comments

[minoanmiss]

Kabocha squash are delicious. Long ago I made 'pumpkin' pies with them.

kale turns out to be improved by being blanched and frozen and then thawed out and cooked.

This is very true. Also, kale can be braised for awhile, like collards.

Try mashing celeriac like potatoes, with butter and milk. that brings out its nuttiness.

[resonant]

I would never have thought of mashed celeraic. I used my last one in my Thanksgiving potpie, but I'm sure there will be more next year.

[lunabee34]

I have always wanted to try celeriac.

[resonant]

It is so weird looking and so impossible to clean. Smells delightful. If you cut it small enough, it's great with an onion and maybe a carrot as the start of a soup, and it's great in broth, but I found I didn't like getting an unexpected mouthful of it.

[lunabee34]

Okay, that sounds awesome. I'm on a mission to find some.

[nestra]

The NYTimes has a recipe for pureed celery root (celeriac) soup that is surprisingly good.

[resonant]

Hm. Now the next thing I want to know is what does chervil taste like?

[kass]

I often make a shredded green mango or papaya and kohlrabi salad in summertime when the local CSA is giving us purple kohlrabi. It goes really well with those flavors (for me) -- lime juice, mint or basil, maybe a smidge of fish sauce. I've also eaten it in a stifry with Thai basil and rice noodles, though I more often eat it raw.

I adore kale, but I realize I am a weirdo. :-D Sometimes with tough wintertime grocery store kale I make a salad where I mix white miso and some sriracha and a bit of sesame oil and massage it into the leaves (which I know sounds weird, but something in that process breaks down the stiffness of the leaves, and after a few hours they are a different texture altogether.) It's a sharp, spicy, salty salad and I often crave those in wintertime especially...

[resonant]

You are a really adventurous cook -- I admire that! I'm going to try to remember that about kohlrabi, because everybody just says, "Oh, it tastes like broccoli stems," and I think, "Well, broccoli stems are delicious, but it's a lot less work to get them just by buying broccoli."

[runpunkrun]

the monkey in my brain thinks I have a mouthful of spiders or something

Is it a texture or taste thing?

[resonant]

Texture -- and I'm mostly not picky about texture, but I can't stand anything fibrous.

[runpunkrun]

I hear you. I love mangoes, but they come in two varieties: stringy and not stringy, and you can never tell which kind you're buying from the outside.

[anatsuno]

Celeriac is a thing I came to like late in life, because I'd mostly encountered it grated like carrots in a rémoulade sauce in institutional food situations and didn't like it. But cut it in thick slabs and roast it with some oil in the oven (or in cubes!) and you get a nutty, delicious tuber veg! I recommend trying it like that. Or cube it and roast it among many other cubes of other tubers, just for a taste, maybe? <3

[resonant]

That's an interesting option. I've only seen it being used almost as a condiment.

Taming the wild kale

[jesse_the_k]

Stems must be removed!

I 'parboil' kale in a covered glass dish by microwaving for 4 minutes.

Then I add that to a big pot (where I've previously sauted ginger and onion) and cook it super low for 20 minutes.

Then I freeze portions and reheat for 2 minutes in the microwave.

I avoid curly kale, preferring lacinato--available commercially. Much easier to strip the greens from the stem.

Re: Taming the wild kale

[resonant]

Ginger and onion, eh? I'll have to try that.

Re: Taming the wild kale

[jesse_the_k]

Sadly, any capsicum is off-limits, so ginger-and-onion is the foundation of pretty much anything I cook.