Jujubes and other unidentifiable vegetables.

More Tastes of China

There are so many choices in the grocery store, its hard to know what to get. Part of the fun is picking up a few new things each time. On this particular trip, it was time to try some vegetable type items.

So we bought a double handful of the things to the right. (Don't worry, we didn't eat the yellow sticky. Its just there for scale. See Dad, you're influence can still be seen halfway across the world.) We thought they might be chestnuts, nope. It turns out these things are Jujubes. The candy that our cousin Matthew is so very fond of is made from this fruit. Who would've guessed. They don't taste much like the candy. In fact, they don't taste much like anything. They are very mild and a little sweet. They sort of look like an apple when you bite into them. They are brown when they are ripe. We didn't know what they were suppose to look like when we got them at the store, so we just grabbed a variety of colors.

We also got all the stuff in this picture. Broccoli, peppers, onions, eggplant, huge carrot, celery, and.. uh... a parsnip?
Nope. It sort of smells like a radish when we cut it open. What are those thing? A daikon? What on earth is that?

A daikon is a variety of the radish. You treat it like a carrot by peeling it, but it tastes like a slightly bitter radish. Interesting. We added one of them to our chicken soup (verdict forthcoming) and the other one got turned into some pickles which are still in the fridge (another verdict forthcoming). So far, these things are not at the top of our 'try again' list.