Climbing the Third Stair

I don't know what I had for dinner tonight.

Actually, that is a slight exaggeration. I know that I had some canned smoked salmon and brown rice; it's the identity of the vegetable I cooked that is in doubt. I found it this evening at my favorite Asian grocery and picked up a bag for dinner. I suppose I could have picked up a bag of the baby bok choi, which is a vegetable I recognize and which would have gone well with the ginger root I was buying (cabbage + fresh ginger = love), but I really wasn't in the mood for bok choi. They had pea pods, but they are pricey and besides, I've always thought of pea pods as something you put in a dish, not something you ate alone and unadorned as a vegetable. Since my favorite Asian grocery has essentially no produce section (did I mention it's on the small side?) I was left with a choice between the mystery vegetable, eggplants, or going somewhere else. I've had the mystery vegetable before and liked it, I'm not all that wild about eggplants, and I was tired and wanted to go home--so, that settled it.

I had bought the mystery vegetable for the first time a few months ago in hopes it was broccoli raab, which it isn't. It's got a stalk and yellow four-petaled flowers like a raab, but when I got it home and got it out of the bag I realized the leaf shape was all wrong. Raab has an oval, almost pointy leaf with a toothed edge; this one was smooth and spoon-like. The flower structure is clear evidence that it is a brassica, but that doesn't get me very far. Cabbage, collards and kale are all Brassica oleracea, while broccoli raab, Napa cabbage, bok choi and turnips are all B. rapa. Brassicas, you will note, have identity issues.

I briefly considered asking one of the store employees what it was, but I feared that she would would give me the Thai name, and I wanted the Latin binomial. Now that I think about it, I think I had it wrong--given the nature of brassicas, the Thai name for it might be more informative. (I say Thai because the people who own and operate the grocery also own and operate the Thai restaurant in the same building. This may not be a safe assumption, given the number of "Chinese" restaurants in Lincoln that are run by Vietnamese or Koreans. But I digress.)

At any rate, it is a tasty vegetable and if you are fond of dark leafy greens I recommend it. The stems cook up tender and cabbagey-sweet, which makes them a wonderful contrast to the slightly bitter chewiness of the leaves. I used my "I'm feeling lazy" method of cooking them, which is wash, chop, stir-fry with garlic, add water and soy sauce and steam with a lid until the liquid is reduced to my satisfaction. I use low-sodium soy sauce, but this is something for you work out with your own blood pressure.

And if you find out the name, will you let me know?