Let’s eat something crunchy

When autumn begins, it feels fun to pull your sweaters and mittens out of storage, and it feels fun to eat soft warm foods like stews and braises.

But now it’s February, and cold weather has ceased to be amusing. Likewise, hot soupy starchy foods have become tedious. Everyone I know is making crunchy salads. My friend Anne Young has been eating citrus and bitter greens. My friend and neighbor Janet Graaff recently came by to borrow dill seeds to sprinkle on a salad that included fennel and carrots and something else, I’ve forgotten what but it was crunchy.

Then the talented Lans Christensen of Kent, a former Gourmet magazine photographer, sent me a beautifully styled image of a salad he’d made with jicama and red cabbage. 

So this week’s column is about jicama.

When I lived in southern California many years ago, people used to eat jicama fairly routinely but they would also eat yucca root and sprouts, both of which I dislike.

Even though jicama can be found here on the East Coast, it isn’t a vegetable that presents itself to me (usually). I don’t see it on menus and my friends don’t cook it. But now I have learned that Lans loves it, and eats it regularly, so I guess it’s time to learn a bit about jicama (which is pronounced hee-kama).

Lans reports that Big Y in New Milford gets one shipment of exotic edibles each week.

“I don’t shop there regularly, but when they have a really nice jicama, it goes right in the basket,” he said. 

The incentive to eat jicama is the taste and texture, he said. 

“The flavor is almost a cross between an apple and a mild radish. It’s the texture that we really like: crisp with a nice crunch that stands up to dressing.”

For jicama novices, he offered these shopping tips:  “They should be about baseball size and very firm. Avoid the big ones, and there should be no soft spots.”

The skin of a jicama root is toxic so definitely cut it off. You can store jicama on the counter until you cut it; after that you need to refrigerate it. 

Once the peel is off, Lans uses the julienne blade on a mandoline slicer. The mandoline is a very sharp cutting tool that is not for the faint of heart; even professional chefs often wear protective gloves when using one. You can also just thin slice your jicama with a sharp knife (be careful, whatever you do).

Once you have your lovely paper-thin slices, mix them with red cabbage, green cabbage and carrots for a nice crisp slaw. Lans didn’t recommend a dressing but I find that an excellent easy slaw dressing is just lemon juice (and lots of it) and lots of dill, a splash of olive oil and some salt and pepper. 

In case you care, jicama has loads and loads of vitamin C, which is nice to have in this really vicious flu-and-cold season. 

But all these crunchy vegetables share another health benefit: They tend to have a lot of water and fiber in them. At this point in this cold dry winter, there is no chance that you aren’t dehydrated. So no matter what crunchy salad you make, whether it has fennel or citrus or jicama, your body will love it.