It's Halloween tomorrow, so I have to interject into our Adaptive Optics story…

Yesterday, Ashmore, Jonas, Arthur and I went to the Alemany Farmers Market in San Fransisco. There were soo many vegetables! I went a bit bokers and bought some of any vegetable I didn't recognize, which since there were a bunch of Asian vendors meant quite a few new foods. Amongst them we found blood limes, bitter melon, dragon fruit and taro root. In the spirit of Halloween, for the reminder of the week taro root will now be called Terror Root!!! We spent most of the rest of the evening cooking and tasting our mysterious foods.

Here's what I learned about our new spooky vegetables… Terror root makes a very affective weapon when used as a projectile, it's slimy after you've peeled it, and it makes delicious chips. Bitter melon makes a pretty good mace, and even saturated in sugar is inedibley bitter. Blood Limes surprisingly were developed by a lab at CSIRO (http://www.csiro.au/science/New-Native-Limes.html) as a salt resistant crop. They were delicious in drinks. My favorite was the Terror Root, I highly recommend adopting it as part of a new Halloween tradition.

Recipes that we tried:
Terror Root Chips – http://www.tinyurbankitchen.com/2010/04/oven-baked-taro-chips.html
Bitter Melon Sorbet – http://bittermelon.org/node/166

Daly City, CA
10/30/11