One day, I was trying to make a recipe that called for zucchini. It was a recipe from the Chinese cookbook I bought off Amazon, but for some reason it has items that are near impossible to find in China. Since I couldn't find a zucchini (some people familiar with weird vegetables might know where I'm going with this) I decided to but a vegetable that looked vaguely similar. The not smart thing I did was I didn't try to Google it or look anything up about how to prepare or cook it. I will just say that it was the worst vegetable I have ever eaten in my entire life (I guess that's not saying much because I like 99% of vegetables). It wasn't edible. At all. Dan couldn't eat it. I couldn't eat it. Even licking it was gross. We ate the meat and the rice, but not much else.
I Googled it after dinner and it's pictured below:
It's called a bitter melon (hence the taste). I read that it's considered the most bitter vegetable and when cooked its texture is similar to that of a zucchini (so at least I got that part right?). One of the main ways to tell if it's ripe is to cut it open and if it's ripe the inside will be red. The one we ate wasn't red at all. Not even a little bit. So not only did we eat the most bitter vegetable the wrong way(as in not prepared the right way) we ate an un-ripe bitter vegetable the wrong way...I don't like the idea of buying a vegetable that you have to cut open to see if it's ripe. It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe Chinese people can tell by the color but I have no idea how to tell. I will never buy it again. I'm not sure if I've ever eaten it in a restaurant. It's something I'll have to pay more attention to.
After this experience, I have Googled all unknown vegetables BEFORE cooking.
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