Day Zero Project #62: Try a new vegetable.

Back in college when everyone goes through a hippie, "Damn the Man!" phase I became vegan, even though the amount of vegetables I ate in my entire life up to that point consisted of corn, potatoes and maybe a little bit of lettuce as long as it was mixed with other stuff so I didn't have to taste it.

Not to be deterred (and generally pig-headed in barreling towards goals that make no sense at all), I purchased the cookbook "Vegan Cooking For One" and set about learning to like vegetables by, naturally, eating only recipes in this book for a whole year.

The book that started it all!

After that year, I said to myself, "That was easy and delicious." and proceeded to be vegan up until just a few years ago when I started working fish and dairy back in my diet.

So, needless to say, trying to find a vegetable that I haven't tried before has proved slightly more difficult that I'd imagined. Every week I would get my vegetable delivery from the awesome Tampa Bay Organics and there would be no veggie I haven't seen before. Stop by Publix, same deal. Stop by the Farmer's Market, same deal. But finally, my box of veggies last week had a new squash I haven't tried before: the Delicata Squash.

It looks like this when raw:

 Then it looks like this:

 
And finally, it looks like this when cooked and stuffed with a quinoa stuffing:

And it's delicious.

And because wasting food is not a good idea, I went ahead and roasted the seeds too. They'll make a good snack and added a nice roasted/smoky flavor to the stuffing.

I also get bonus points for getting confused and thinking I needed to "Try a new fruit," which lead me to eat this weird thing:

And please don't judge the rambutan by it's cover. He's not much to look at, but he's delicious.