Weird Vegetables

by Anne Middleton, on August 5th, 2015

If you’ve ever journeyed to the grocery store with celerity to buy celeriac or fiddled with fiddleheads in a side dish, you’re a true foodie or training to be on the next season of Chopped. If you’re perusing the produce aisles and sighing when you see the all-too-familiar broccoli, then we have some oddball veggies we’d like to introduce you to:

Romanesco—Teach your kids math and Fibonacci sequences with this exotic varietal of cauliflower. Great in stir fry, the spirals on the head of romanesco follow the Fibonacci pattern.

Kai-Lan—AKA Chinese Broccoli, it can be a substitute for any recipe you’d normally include broccoli. The greens are scrumptious too. Toss them in a salad.

Sunchoke—Potatoes have a low-starch alternative in the sunchoke, more commonly referred to as the Jerusalem artichoke. You can also ferment it and craft your own alcoholic beverages for this native North American root vegetable.

Samphire—A variety of seaweed, it pairs well with piscine cuisine. Commonly pickled and put in salads in England, it’s also a biodiesel source.

“Preserving Wild Foods: A Forager’s Recipes for Curing, Canning, Smoking & Pickling” is available on Google Play and will help you to pickle some samphire you’ve foraged. Verizon has the tablets, like the Verizon Ellipsis 8, and accessories to help you explore foraged foods and vegetables from far-flung locations. Get up to 50% off accessories using our codes.

All you have in your fridge is some kai-lan, pancetta, whoopee pies and quail eggs and the grocery store is closed? Hopefully, you’ve been watching and learning from Chopped. If not, get the Watch Food Network app and get introduced to a veritable smorgasbord of rare and exotic food stuffs and how to transmogrify them. Next time you’re shopping, you may nix the potatoes and dish up the sunchoke instead. T-Mobile offers free shipping on all orders of $25 or more so rev up your cuisine by getting yourself an Ipad.

Don’t vegetate when it comes to honing your culinary skills. Experiment with exotic vegetables. Whether you’re looking to make a geometrically-inspired stir fry with romanesco or foraying into foraging with samphire, challenge yourself! We’ll help you save up, so you can branch out!