A Better Bag of Groceries

Mystery Vegetable In My Fridge

Monday, February 1, 2010 at 06:43 AM

What is this vegetable and how did it get into my refrigerator?  Good question.  Another good question would be why is it starting to look a little wilted?  That would be because it’s been hanging out in my refrigerator waiting for me to do something with it – for an amount of time that I am ashamed to disclose.

Regular A Better Bag of Groceries readers have heard me talk about how I’m on this quest to cook through THAT part of the produce section.  You know – the part where there are lots of beets with leafy tops, unfamiliar greens, and this specimen.  This was supposed to be anise.  You see, I was chatting with my friend (and spinning instructor) April, a regular reader of ABBG.  She was gushing about anise and how it is this awesome vegetable that tastes like licorice and how she would like to know how else she can prepare it – other than her usual method, which is steaming.  Sounded like a great blog topic to me, so I planned to buy some anise.

I headed to the grocery store for my usual weekly shopping trip with my 4-year-old in tow.  For the past few weeks, we’ve been trying out the hand-held scanner for our shopping.   This was only our second trip using the HHS, and I must admit, it takes some getting used to.  Fortunately, I can still get my long and leggy, yet flexible, pre-schooler into the child seat of my shopping cart and she is my Scanner.  She really digs the whole scanning thing and promptly tells me the numbers that come up on the scanner.  It keeps her entertained and contained – truly a miracle in the grocery store.  My favorite part is check-out, when I can forgo the whole putting everything on the belt and bagging procedure.  Woo hoo!  However, the most cumbersome part of the process is shopping in Produce, because you have to weigh your items and print bar codes.  I grabbed this leafy vegetable, thinking it was anise, and upon weighing and printing my bar code, I found out that it, indeed, was not.  It is Chinese Cabbage.  Since I was so new to the Hand Held Scanning thing, I did not realize that you can delete items from your order – easily.  I figured that out later in my shopping trip when aforementioned 4-year-old scanned the same can of crushed tomatoes 3 times.

So now, I am the proud owner of a head of Chinese Cabbage.  It is an Incredible Vegetable with a NuVal score of 100.  All good.  But I just don’t know what to do with it.  I need help.  That’s where you come in…

Question of the Day

What, oh what, should I do with the Chinese Cabbage?

Posted by: Melissa 4 comments

Posted in: Incredible Vegetables

Tags: Chinese Cabbage