Today I learned I was singing the wrong word - and how to prep an artichoke.

Hi there, readers. :) How's it going?

Things here are good, despite the lack of sleep and general wonkiness that accompanies sleep deprivation. I have that song stuck in my head:

Running onnnn...Running on empty

Running onnnn...Running drrrrrrrry

Running on, Running into the sun

But I'm running behind. . .

This one always pops into my head when I have no energy. Funny thing is that I just looked up the lyrics and found out I was singing it wrong all these years. It's not running "dry" - It's running "blind." Oh. Alright. I guess that makes sense, too. You ever have a song that you were singing with the wrong lyrics? Well, that's just one of the little things I learned today.

Remember this fellow?

I bought him a little while back during my lesson on unfamiliar produce.

One by one, I tackled the strange produce.

For starters, one thing I learned about the weird produce I bought

is that there aren't a lot of recipes that call for

one parsnip or one turnip or one artichoke.

The rutabaga and celery root were sizeable, and so

I had less obstacles figuring out what to do with them.

I chopped up the celery root and boiled it with my mashed potatoes. Aside from adding extra nutrients and visual interest in the potatoes it improved the flavor, too. I put it on my grocery list for my most recent trip to the store, and was so disappointed
when they didn't have any more. Awww, man!

Isn't that just how it goes?

Ah, well. I'll just keep watching for it.

One thing I learned about the rutabaga is that it is HARD to cut. I had bought the largest one I could find, and got my knife stuck in it a few times. Perhaps my mad ninja skills have gone rusty. At any rate, I bought smaller rutabagas at the store last night.
Lesson learned.

I diced the rutabaga up and oven-roasted it with olive oil, garlic salt and parsley.

And I diced and added in that lone parsnip:

Which smelled very much like a carrot when I peeled it, by the way.

It was a huge hit. Both of the kids loved it and Super Hubby had a look of surprise

when he tasted those roasted outcasts and said, "Wow! That's actually good!"

While the inner wanna-be chef in me cringed a little at the "actually" part -

I knew what he meant.  I mean, just look at them.

I think it's time to boost the Produce Section Roots' self-esteem.

Because under those bland exteriors, they are just so mild and sweet.
I mean, at least "wall flowers" are pretty.

These poor things get a bad rap because they're badly wrapped.

And usually hiding in dirt. ;)

I picked up some more turnips at the store to go with the one that I bought.

They are pretty easy to prepare. And since rutabagas are in the turnip family,

I feel a little experienced in handling them.

And that left the artichoke.

I think he's the most intimidating fellow I picked up.

Especially when you consider that he used to be part of a thistle.

I hate letting food waste away in the fridge,

 but I do it more often then I'd prefer to admit.

The one I bought went all wilty in the drawer and so I decided

to share him with the outdoor bunnies in my yard.

 

I bought new ones last night and decided that I would learn how to prepare them
from a nice fellow on YouTube:

 

What a great accent.
He also has a helpful video about choosing artichokes.

I'm making dip with my artichokes, and so we'll see how it turns out...

I am still trying to behave so my wrist has a chance to recover. Between the joint pain of my early onset arthritis and my carpal tunnel tingles at night, the quality of my sleep lately has been somewhat lacking. I'm still searching for my wrist brace and I'll probably have to cave and go to the doctor if it doesn't start improving soon. It's a good thing I have a lot of how-to lessons planned this week because I'll be able to let the pictures speak for themselves. In the meantime...

I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned about crazy apple contraptions

Lesson Learned Thursday, March 11, 2010

My mom loves apples. Her kitchen is decorated in apples. Her fridge is stocked with apples. We have an annual apple-pie assembly day with our extended family. She even works at an orchard seasonally. And today we learned about her cool apple contraptions.

I should start by saying that we recently learned that not all contraptions are useful.

Although we got a LOT of entertainment value from her handy-dandy egg-cracker.

Here is attempt #1

Attempt #2

Attempt #3

ROFL! To quote Larry the Cucumber:

"I laughed, I cried. It moved me, Bob."

The funniest part about that is that she is a total pro at cracking and separating eggs.

With all the batches of homemade bread she's made, she could do it in her sleep.

But there's such allure in those late-night infommercial wares.

Especially if they sell them at the store where she works.

Oh, and BTW, I totally covet her Perfect Brownie Pan.

I love edge pieces and in this cool thingie, they are ALL edge pieces!

It's the little things. :)

But back to mom's apple contraptions...

Of course, she introduced us to that standard corer/slicer long ago.

Tonight she showed me her twist-corer. It's pretty neat.

You just twist it right through the apple . . .

 And then you pull it from the apple and just push the core through the device.

Aw, man! Cinnamon under my fingernails.

(My husband is going to give me such a hard time about that...LoL!)

Oh! And look! What could that be???

Yet another unintentional doughnut sighting!

I'm going to have to start tagging them...

And now that your apple is cored,

you can bake it in this cool microwave apple baker!

Baked apples are such a good dessert! They take 20-30 minutes in the oven

But only about 4 min. to "wave" them. (That's what they say in Japan. :)

They're especially good sprinkled with a little cinnamon or apple pie spice.

The last cool contraption is one that I've seen her use before but never learned how to use it. It comes in really handy on our pie-making day. Last year we made over a hundred pies. With about five apples in a pie, you can probably guess that peeling apples and slicing apples and coring apples would get pretty tiresome.

And that's why this gets Top Apple Thingie-Bopper award:

And if I find any other cool apple contraptions -

I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned that I've learned a lot in February

Here it is the last day in February and so I’ve decided to review what I’ve learned this month from my Learning Something New Every Day challenge.

I've had fun playing with photos in Elements 8.

Thanks, first of all, to you who take the time to follow this blog. I always have more fun doing something when I know that I can drag someone else along. :)

I feel like I have learned more in the past month than I ever thought possible. I’m not just talking about the posts I’ve made either. I’m talking about the hundred other little things that come and go in the course of the day. Because I’m so focused on learning new things for my blog, it’s like I have my learning radar on. Beep-beep-beep…lesson detected! It’s like when you focus on the color red and suddenly you see all the things in the room that are red. I’ve been focusing on learning new things, so when I learn something new, that lesson blips on the radar. –Oh, cool! You can use a wad of aluminum foil to scour your pans? –Beep!- Hey – I just learned something new. And I’ve had this epiphany that just stopping to notice that you’ve learned something helps you learn it better!

And the same way that my learning radar goes off when I learn something new, it blips when I see something I don’t know about. I feel sometimes like my childhood curiosity has been rebooted. When we were making something with eggs the other day I held an egg in my hand and wondered how it got from the chicken to my house. Do they inspect these on a conveyor belt? If they do, how do they keep them from cracking and rolling around? We drove past a herd of horses the other day and I realized that I don’t know how to put a saddle on a horse. And then I wondered when the first saddles came about and how many different kinds of saddles there are and how much a saddle costs.

And when my four-year-old daughter starts asking me questions, I’m right there with her wondering the same thing. “I don’t know why – let’s go find out.”

Like this stuff.

I’ve passed it a hundred times in the grocery store and never gave it any thought. But recently when I saw it – after I started the blog - I wondered about its purpose and function and origin. What do you do with it?

It turns out that you can do A LOT of things with it. There’s an eight-page pamphlet on the Borax website that tells you about SOME of its household uses. Wash laundry. Clean your garbage disposal. Preserve flowers. Extinguish flames. But a little extra research turned up even more interesting info. Like you can use it to make homemade Super Balls or Silly Putty! (You can bet I’m going to learn how to do that!) This stuff is crazy awesome! My sink is shinier than I’ve ever gotten it before! And I never would have known if my learning mindset hadn’t piqued my interest.

You know, I’m the sort of person who easily gets stuck in a rut. I’m the kind that gets the same thing every time I visit a restaurant because I know I like it. I take the same route to the grocery because I can go there on autopilot. Before this blog I ate either Eight-Grain hot cereal or a granola bar for breakfast pretty much every weekday. I never had to think about it. Recently on a day my husband was home we decided that waffles sounded good for breakfast but we realized we were out of batter mix. It’s so much trouble going to the store just for batter mix, and we probably would have just had our standard breakfast if I hadn’t thought to just look up a recipe for waffles from scratch. Oh my goodness. They were WAY better than the box mix. And breakfast has been completely morphed at our house. Now I eat fresh-cut mango or a poached egg with hollandaise or even scones with flower petals in them. Breaking out of the rut and going off the beaten trail, I’ve realized the scenery here is much more impressive.

A trip to the grocery usually ends up looking more adventurous than it did before.

Tonight I bought these:

Can you tell me what these are?

Because before tonight, the only one I could identify was the artichoke.

This one is a rutabaga.

Did you know that they carve into jack-o-lanterns in Britain and Ireland?

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Hello, Mr. Parsnip.

Did you know that parsnips are related to carrots, and until the discovery of the Americas they were the main starch on the menu? What new starch came from the New World that made everyone ditch their beloved tuber? None other than the potato. The Romans thought parsnips were an aphrodisiac, but how sultry can they be if they were replaced by potatoes?

The Recipe I Plan to Try

This one is a turnip.

The Persians believed it was a remedy for treating the common cold. And that was even before they knew these babies are high in Vitamin C.

The Recipe I Plan to Try

An Artichoke

I knew what this is. Well sort of.

I didn't know it's actually part of a thistle.

The part that the little purple poof grows out of...
I bet Eeyore would like this dip:

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Celeriac –AKA Celery Root
Is it just me, or does it look like it's smiling?

I’ve read that tossing some of this in when you’re boiling potatoes to mash not only increases the nutritional value, but also the flavor. Hmm. Interesting. Health Benefits

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Another thing I’ve learned is that I’m not the only one who doesn’t know these things. I was driving my shopping cart around the store with this surfer-headed looking root and I had about five people stop and ask me what the heck it was and how the heck you use it. (Hi to my fellow midnight grocery shoppers! Thanks for asking about the address to this site. I hope my recipe ideas help...)

OK, and here’s another produce-related Learning Experience I’ll toss in for fun.

The fruit on the left is a pomelo. This is basically what a grapefruit would be like if it were in a good mood. Sweet, and mild-mannered. The one on the right is what happens if Waybums uses her imagination and pretends that the one on the left is a T-Rex egg and hides it away in a nest somewhere in the house until it become petrified.

I will spare you from what happened to the avocado/brachiosaurus egg…

It was not pretty.

What else have I learned this month? Well the most surprising thing I learned this month came from a conversation I had at the store tonight. I had a happenstance meeting with a reader that thanked me for my snowblower post. I'd never met her before but she heard about the site from her friend, a grocery store employee that I shared the site with the day that I bought mangoes. :) It's a small world, after all.

She said that the idea of learning something new every day sounded cool so she went back and started at the beginning and was sucked in by my stories. And she said that when she got to the snowblower story she read the part where I wrote about my husband explaining that the snowblower was supposed to do all the work and that I was pushing it too hard. I wrote that something in life "will either work or it won't, but pushing something harder than it's supposed to go will wear you out," and she said that it hit her like a ton of bricks. You see, she had been in an abusive relationship and she realized that she was working so hard at constantly trying to keep him happy that she was wearing herself to nothingness. So she left him that day and although it's been a challenge stepping out on her own, it's been completely worth it to feel so freed. She said that reading about me doing things that I used to be afraid to do or unmotivated to figure out helps her to think outside of her box, too. She said that her boyfriend always did the engine maintenance on her vehicles and that she figured if I could push past eating moldy cheese, she could figure out how to check her oil. Wow. How humbling!

(Oh, dear reader, how I treasure that you shared that with me, and thank you for allowing me to share that here. I could barely keep myself from becoming a big puddle when you told me your story. You are a very brave person and I am glad to have met you. You single-handedly made those nights that I stay up waaaay too late working on this blog worthwhile.)

So, the greatest thing I've learned from this blog is that we all have something to learn in life. We just have to make sure our radar is on so we can catch the opportunity to learn it.

Thanks for a month of fun and . . .

I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned to give moldy cheese and Ugli fruit a chance.

I had plans to learn how to make an origami crane today. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn how to do, but just never got around to it. But after spending so much time tinkering on the blog yesterday, I had to catch up on some housework and do a little grocery shopping. Ok, a lot of grocery shopping. (I had cheese and crackers for breakfast so the kids could have the last of the milk with their cereal.) The day flew by with all the tidying I had to catch up on, and it was late afternoon before I got to the grocery store. And when we got to the store, today’s lesson was waiting there.

Right inside the store, Waybums shuddered and pointed, making her “blech” face:

“Mother! What is THaT?”

That sticker can’t be good for a fruit’s self-esteem.

It was an interesting find, since I had learned about these during preparations for my mango lesson. I took pity on the fruit and its sticker of shame and came to its defense.

“It’s called an Ugli fruit. But I hear it’s really pretty tasty.”

“It doesn’t look tasty.”

“Well, looks can be deceiving. Just like with people, it’s what’s on the inside that matters.”

Patting myself on the back for my lesson in non-judgment, I went back to the dairy section. I scanned over the various types of cheese, thinking how cool it had been to learn how to make cheese, when I saw The Blue Cheese. I looked at it, warily. It challenged me. Just last week I had posted my lofty standards. "No fuzz." But wasn’t one of the main reasons I started this blog to stretch myself? To learn about and experience new things? I've tried octopus, for goodness sake. Is moldy cheese really that big of a deal? *shudder*

I picked up the cheese and deposited it in the cart next to my Ugli fruit, realizing my new lesson for the evening would be: Learning to give unlovely food a chance.

The Ugli Fruit

This fruit was discovered growing wild in Jamaica, and it's what Bob Ross likes to call a "happy little accident," as a hybridization between a grapefruit, an orange and a tangerine. I've always been fascinated with hybrids. Ligers and Tiglons and  Mules - Oh, my. I have much less knowledge of plant hybrids, though. I remember one summer when my Mom had a garden that accidentally produced a few bizarre cucumelons. They weren't very tasty. The Ugli fruit is another story, though...

Obviously these fellows have some skin problems, and the rind is thick and soft.

They're very easy to peel.

The first thing I noticed was that there was this gaping cavity in the middle.

Look! Another unexpected doughnut for the blog!

Slices, pictured with Skilpad, our trusty mascot, for size reference.

The smell was exceptionally alluring - sweetly citrusy. Very summery and warm. When I took the first bite of one of those big slices, the thing I noticed most was how juicy these are! And the flavor was unique. Sweet, and yet retaining a little of that grapefruit zing in there to keep it interesting. I got Waybums to try a piece. And she came back for another. And another. It's pretty satisfying, and being so large we have leftovers for breakfast in the morning.

The Blue Cheese

So, I shouldn't have done my research BeFoRe I ate the cheese.

Because it did nothing to prompt my desire to try it.

 
The legend behind blue cheese is that a shepherd was hanging out in one of the local caves with his cheese and other lunch staples when he saw a cute girl off in the distance and spent the next few days trying to find her. Supposedly, when he got back to the cave, he saw that his cheese curds had been attacked by mold spores and he decided to eat it anyway. I don't know. I have a problem with that part of the story.
 
One time when I lived in San Diego I accidentally ate some moldy peanut butter toast. Well, I ate the toast on purpose, but not the mold. The worst part was that when I went to put the last two pieces of bread away, I flipped the butt of the loaf over and it was bright green.  I'd just eaten four pieces of that bread. Bleh. I just can't imagine finding that loaf of bread and knowing it was growing with who-knows-what, shrugging and chomping on it anyway.
 

Of course, I did just buy pre-moldy cheese.

Hmm.

 

Ok, but I know it's moldy on purpose and that it's regulated mold that other people have been eating and surviving. Yeah. That makes it ok. But then I found out that the bacteria prompted to grow on this cheese is the same bacteria that causes foot odor. Yum.

So, I trudged on with my lesson, knowing all these things. There were a few crumbles that fell off the end of the cheese and they seemed like a good place to start. I poured a glass of sparkling grape juice so I'd have wash-down capabilities and popped the crumb in my mouth.

I've never tasted anything like it before in my life.

I'm not saying that I loved it right away and was savoring it. I'm just saying that it completely perplexed and dumbfounded my tastebuds. The texture is creamy and crumbly, smooth. It was such a unique flavor, and hard to categorize. It was kind of earthy, and reminded me of the frangrance of morels we'd found mushroom hunting. It had the boldness of "tangy" without the twang. Instead of twanging at the end, it sort of tingled. It was savory, but not really salty. The white part of the cheese was very mild and the moldy part was much more powerful tasting. I kept popping more crumbs in because I was trying to figure out how to define the flavor.

I Did Not Like

Green Fuzz on Cheese

Would not try it

Thank you, please.

But after just a teeny bite

I thought that it

might be alright...

By George! I kind of liked this moldy cheese! So I looked up a recipe for it and tried it out - Blue Cheese and Broccoli Soup. I thought it was really pretty good. I had some heavy whipping cream that I had to use up and I substituted that for one of the cups of milk. And I put more onions and thyme in. The Blue Cheese really made it.

 It's also a little less intimidating when you can't see the fuzz.

My mom was always pretty good about encouraging me to try new things when I was a kid. Even if it was just to take one bite. "You never know until you try it," was the motto I remember. It's led me to some interesting culinary adventures through the years. And now I've had one more.  

Thanks for coming along, and I'll keep you posted about tomorrow's adventure. :)

Today I learned how to confront a mango.

Sometimes I’m a little scared off by certain produce. And I don’t just mean when a potato grows a somewhat disturbing set of antlers:

~~~~~~~~~~

I’m talking about produce that is mysterious to me. Kumquats. Pomegranates. Avocados. Turnips. Parsnip. These are all things that I never had growing up, and so I do not know how to select them, use them, eat them, prepare them – anything them.

Now, anyone who knows me can tell you that I am quite adventurous when it comes to trying new foods. Over the years, I’ve tried everything from octopus to green tea ice cream. Well, when I was in college I had one particularly interesting eating experience.

One of my friends had a kindred spirit of spontaneity, and we would do completely random things from time to time, like drive to the nearest playground and see who could swing the highest. Well, one night he had accompanied me to the grocery store and we saw a display of mangoes and decided to try them.

We sat in the parking lot eating them, skin and all, like you’d eat an apple. They were delicious – so juicy and tropical. It was like someone had bound sunshine into a peel. We were chatting away and got closer to the seed in the middle and were gnawing at the remaining flesh when we both suddenly realized we had something stuck in our teeth. Little did we know that mangoes are booby-trapped and that there is a layer of dense fibers around the seeds that, if eaten in the way we tried, will leave you feeling like you have just flossed with a string of twine. We grinned for each other and could easily see the hundreds of poky strands jutting between our bicuspids. We laughed until tears, and that night I learned how NoT to eat a fresh mango.

It’s been a dozen years since then, and since I’m embarking on this mission of exploration I figured I should give it another try. This time armed with a little research. I looked up how to choose a ripe mango (smells good with a little give when you press the skin), and brought one home from the store.

Ready for round two.

Mango juice is good, but the fruit is so tasty, too.

I love the idea that this fruit has been somewhere warm, soaking up the sunshine.

You can see here that a mango’s shape is like a flattened football. When you stand it vertically, like so, the parts on the sides that bow out are the best part of the fruit’s flesh.

First step is peeling. Something else I learned about mangoes today is that mango trees belong to the family Anacardiaceae. Another family member in that group? Poison Ivy. Now, from what I've read, mango fruit itself is pretty harmless. However if you are particularly sensitive to poison ivy you may be sensitive to the sap and natural oils on the peel and should be careful to wash the fruit well and wash your hands after handling the peel. I didn't know that before. And since I'm somewhat sensitive to poison ivy, I was careful to wash right up afterward.

Cut off the part of the fruit that bows out, on each side of the seed,

aka stone.

Is it making a face at me?

Now, dice the flesh of the fruit.

And when you're done with that, you can trim more off of the seed.
Don't be caught off-guard by the siren call of the fruit left on that seed.
~~~~~~
I washed and scrubbed the remaining flesh off
so you could see those tricky fibers underneath:


I spent many hours flossing and laughing....
so you could know what NoT to do. ;)

It was every bit as tasty as I remembered it.

Now that I know how to do this, there's a recipe for mango sorbet I've always thought looked tasty... Again, it's not a cooking blog, but I'm also not afraid to enjoy a season of food exploration. Especially since lessons about the outside world are largely unavailable right now.

And if any of you has an idea of something I should learn, or something you can teach me - please feel free to let me know. :)

I've got some exciting things lined up for this month. I'm in the process of setting up interviews with a few businesses and I already have a date with Smokey the Bear (!) and some other mascots in the near future. Awesome.

And, to throw in something extra, I am trying to teach my daughter patience. So here's our pet project for this week:

~~~~~~~~~

My daughter's new pet.

Baby T-Rex and Skilpad hang out in the pool.
He's supposed to grow 600x his size.

I'll give you updates on progress at the week's end.

Have you learned anything new, lately? Come on, don't be shy...

~~~~~~~~~~~

I'll be back tomorrow as usual, and,

I'll keep you posted.