Runaway October

Step One: Find a lovely Jicama. One you fully intend on eat­ing. Make sure it’s not irra­di­ated — a Farmer’s Mar­ket of some sort is your best bet.

Step Two: Place Jicama on your counter and con­tem­plate what to do with it. For a few weeks. Begin to worry what to do with it when it starts to sprout vines, kinda like potato eyes.

Step Three: Get creeped out when the vines get long enough to reach out and caress you while you’re cooking.

Step Four: Name it. Her­bert is what I went with.

Step Five: Find a pot, mine still had some old soil in it. Par­tially fill pot with cac­tus soil, after read­ing on the Inter­net that Jicama needs really good drainage. Place the Jicama in pot so it’s top is a cou­ple inches down from the rim. Put more cac­tus soil around the bulb. Real­ize you don’t have enough cac­tus soil and top it off with some com­post mulch. Leave the bulb stick­ing out of a soil because you think it’s pretty.

Step Six: Put it in a sunny loca­tion and water spar­ingly. You don’t want the bulb to rot.

Step Seven: Worry when the vines start to dry up and die and notice that it has no real leaves yet. Decide that all the info that you read on the Inter­net was right and that Jicama is really hard to grow. Give up hope and leave it alone.

Step Eight: Real­ize that it’s start­ing to get really nice leaves. Feel your sense of accom­plish­ment swell.

Step Nine: Allow your green thumb to take full credit of your awe­some Jicama Vine. Decide you’ll worry about replant­ing it later, when it’s not so blast­edly hot in AZ.

Notice: Jicama is highly toxic in most forms. The leaves and vines espe­cially. I find mixed infor­ma­tion on the tox­i­c­ity of the pods. Appar­ently they’re fried and eaten in some cultures.

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 Manic Mon­day for July 21

What’s your favorite beach in the world?

I’ve actu­ally only been to a few beaches… The beach in San Diego was crowded, dirty and pretty much ghetto — not my first choice. The only other beach I’ve been to are the ones in Rocky Point, Mex­ico. So I’ll have to answer this ques­tion after I’ve trav­eled the world a lit­tle bit more.

What’s the next coun­try you want to visit?

Ire­land, hands down, though Ger­many, Bel­gium and Asu­trailia are all pretty evenly tied for second.

What one thing are you crav­ing today?

Does peace and quiet count? Or a maid? I am crav­ing a meal that some­one else cooks for me and cleans up after­wards. Or a prime rib from Out­back, I always crave those. Or Honey Hot chicken wings from The Vine. I should prob­a­bly go cook din­ner now.