Actually, if I’m being honest, this looks a bit more like an elephant foot and a small dropping. Whatever it looked like, it was what we had for dinner and it was certainly yummy.
During the growing season, I love to go to a local farm stand and try to figure out how to use whatever is in season. Last year I found this….
This jumbo pink banana squash weighed in at about 14 pounds and cost me a whopping $1.00. I roasted it used it for soup with a little cinnamon. It was DELICIOUS!! It had an earthly sweet flavor that complimented the cinnamon. I’d hoped the farm had grown these again, but all I could find was the elephant poop squash, which is actually a Blue Hubbard squash and cost me $3.00 for an 8 pound squash. Not quite as budget friendly as the pink one, but pretty tasty. Blue Hubbard squash taste a bit more like what we’ve come to expect from canned pumpkin.
I roasted this squash and made another soup, but this time I added some ginger, celery and chipotle pepper. I used an immersion blender to blend it to a velvety smoothness and now I have a warm lunch for the rest of the week.
Sometimes I forget that many people wouldn’t even try to find a way to eat something that’s verdi gris, bumpy and looks different. I recently found gooseberries at the grocery store, which are not a common thing here on the East Coast. The little yellow fruits looked a bit like grape tomatoes and oddly had a tangy sweet/tart flavor to them. Almost like a grape tomato, but super sweet. I liked them! In that same shopping trip, I found this…
I have eaten jackfruit before, but I’ve never seen one in the wild. The jackfruit I had eaten was prepped and in a package. I posted a picture of this on social media and I got feedback that it’s quite smelly, so I’m glad I left the prepping up to someone else.
Last week, I went to play bingo with some friends at a local fire hall. Even though everyone was buying pizza, nachos and cupcakes, I knew they were actually secretly coveting my bag of cut celery. As a follow up to my noisy noshing, I had brought along some thin rice cakes smeared with sunflower and hemp butter. One of the people at bingo has a condition where he can’t taste what he’s eating (sometimes I think about him and comfort myself when I’m feeling a bit down about what I “can’t” have). At least I can taste what I’m eating.
After producing my rice cake with sunflower butter, he asked me what I was eating. I told him. His eyebrows shot up like I was eating the oddest thing on the planet. When I was done I got up from the table to do something else and heard him exclaiming to Hubby, “Did you see what she was eating!! Some kind of sunbutter thing!!”, as if it was an elephant foot/turd or something.
Snippets and Tidbits 