This week, I emptied The Misfits Market Box with my usual fanfare, laying all the contents on the counter in groups of like things. When I reached the bottom of The Misfits Box, I pulled out a heavy, roundish brown/grey thing. My husband—the researcher—did some googling and said it was a jicama (pronounced “hikkama”).
Great! I’ve had jicama in restaurants before—The Yardley Inn in Yardley, PA, serves its shrimp cocktail with a little jicama and avocado salad, and their shrimp are what I call “three bite shrimp.” Love it! To be honest, the jicama doesn’t taste like much, kinda cucumber-ish: fresh and crunchy, but less watery.
It’s way too hot to cook here this week, so I’ve been putting jicama in our salads. I’m using about a quarter of the jicama per meal (2 salads). Here are a couple pointers.
Fail: I grated the jicama into a salad. That wasn’t good. It took on a sort of wet tissue substance I didn’t enjoy. It was definitely edible but I’m not doing that again.
Win: for the next salad, I cut the jicama quarter into little cubes. This let the jicama keep some of its pleasant crunch in the salad. Very tasty. My friend even thought it was cheese.
Another option: julienne some jicama and put it in coleslaw. If you just want to use it up, you could hide a lot of it in some tasty coleslaw dressing.
Jicama is a great example of a veggie I would never have bought before it came to me in the Misfits Market Box. Now, I’m much more comfortable with it, and would definitely choose to add it to summer dishes.
Thank you Misfits Market for helping us all brave the veggie frontier!
The jicama made it's way into this tasty salad.
