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Somehow, I lived for 30 years without tomatillos, but there’s no going back now. While I was on my way back from South Africa last weekend, my husband was on his own to select the vegetables for our CSA share (some programs pick for you, but ours lets us choose at the farmstand). When I returned, he proudly showed me our loot, which included a rainbow of peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and corn.

Tomatillos, courtesy of Flickr user Polkaroo

“I also got these. I’m hoping you know what they are,” he said, holding out what looked like golf-ball sized green tomatoes wrapped in tan, papery husks.

“Tomatillos!” I exclaimed, recognizing them from photos on one of the food blogs I follow.

“Great! So what do we do with them?” he asked. I had no idea, but my Twitter friends, always a good sounding board for such questions, responded with a chorus of “salsa!”

We decided to try this Rick Bayless recipe (suggested by Leela of She Simmers), and were dumbstruck by how easy and delicious it was. The tomatillos broiled quickly in the toaster oven, and had a citrusy tang of their own before we even added the lime juice. The resulting salsa jazzed up our roasted corn, pepper & bean burritos that night, and our veggie burgers the next night.

Here are five more ways to try tomatillos:

1. Salads. Back to Bayless again: his heirloom tomato “carpaccio” salad with tomatillos sounds divine. You could use the tomatillos in a dressing—What’s Gaby Cooking has a recipe that promises to be “the most delicious Avocado and Tomatillo Dressing ever!”

2. Pork chops and applesauce. Spice up traditional comfort food with this Gourmet recipe for “grilled monster pork chops with tomatillo and green apple sauce.” (Serve with a Humphrey Bogart accent.)

3. Guacamole. I didn’t think it was possible for me to love the stuff even more, but tomatillos could take it to a whole new level. Try this tomatillo guacamole recipe from Kristen of Cheap, Healthy, Good.

4. Eggs. Make Huevos Rancheros or a Mexican-cheese omelet, or simply top your scrambled eggs with tomatillo salsa.

5.  Soups. Try Andrea’s roasted tomatillo soup with chicken, Food & Wine’s pork and tomatillo stew, or this vegetarian-friendly black bean and tomatillo soup from Kayln’s Kitchen.

Radish pods, courtesy of Flickr user beautiful cataya

Last week I tasted a vegetable I didn’t know existed: radish pods. They looked a little like short pea pods or green beans but were more delicate and crunchier, and had the pungent bite of a radish, though milder. In fact, they are the seed pods of a radish plant that has been allowed to flower and go to seed. Some varieties, such as the rattail radish (clearly not named with marketability in mind), are grown specifically for the pods, though any radish variety will produce them.

My coworker, whose husband grew the radish pods, told me they are eaten raw as a snack with beer in Germany. Further research turned up a couple of other recipes: in India, the pods are called moongre and added to stir-fries, such as this Moongre ki Subzi recipe with potatoes and spices. They can also be pickled or thrown in a salad.

I like radishes—the root of the plant—but I might even prefer their less-famous seed pods. It’s kind of like the schoolgirl crush I had on movie star Matt Dillon, only to discover years later that his brother Kevin is funnier. Or maybe it’s like discovering that the class clown writes serious poetry—and it’s good!

I’m pretty green at gardening—by which I mean “new,” not that I have a knack for it, to which my sad potted basil will attest. But I like the idea of planting something that will be edible beyond its usual harvest time, or that has more than one edible part—multi-taskers.

As it turns out, quite a few plants have edible parts that aren’t as well-known as the food they are grown for. For instance, many vegetables have edible leaves—even carrots, as Amanda discovered—and some have edible flowers. Squash blossoms are delicious stuffed, battered and fried. Chive blossoms are pretty and add a pungent, onion-like flavor to a salad or vegetable dish. Most herb blossoms, including basil, thyme and oregano, are also edible and taste similar to the rest of the plant. Garlic scapes, the early green shoot of a garlic bulb, have become a farmers’ market favorite—I tried them last year, and they are delicious.

A chart on the Texas A&M site lists some other “secondary edible parts” of common vegetables, although, as the authors point out, not all of these parts are necessarily as tasty. Unfurled corn tassels are listed as edible, for instance, but I’m not sure how appetizing they sound.

The list is far from complete, I’m sure. Have you eaten any unexpectedly tasty parts of vegetables or fruits?

I spent last week in and around Cape Town, South Africa, traveling with my mom to attend my brother’s wedding. All we knew ahead of time about South African cuisine was that they love a good cookout, and sure enough, our first meal there turned out to be a braai (Afrikaans for “roasted meat,” though like “barbecue,” the word is used to describe the event as well as the food itself) at the home of my brother’s new in-laws.

Heating up for a braai, a South African barbecue, at a home in Cape Town.

They seemed surprised that I was so impressed by the wood-fired brick oven built into their outdoor patio—apparently those are about as ubiquitous in South Africa as backyard gas grills are in America. There, as here, the grill tends to be literally manned, while the kitchen is women’s turf (at least in the homes I visited). On that particular Sunday afternoon, a guy named Willem was the chef d’jour.

See the boxy metal container inside the grill in this photo? That’s where Willem stoked a wood fire for at least an hour while the meat marinated. From time to time, he shook the container so that hot embers fell out and could be raked into a layer under the rest of the grill, creating a low, even source of heat.

Boerewors, a type of South African sausage

“A good braai can take all day. It’s not just a meal, it’s an occasion, a time to get together and talk and relax outside,” he explained as my stomach rumbled. Finally, he brought out the meat, starting with a long rope of boerewors (sausage) which he coiled inside a clamshell-style metal grilling basket.

When I asked what was in it, he shrugged.

“I don’t know, just minced meat. Boer means farmers, and wors means sausage,” he explained.

“So….it’s made of minced farmers?” I responded, generating a round of startled laughter.

Next up were chicken sosaties, or what I would call kebabs, one batch marinated in mustard and yogurt and the next in a sticky-sweet barbecue glaze. Then came lamb chops, and finally, some three hours after it all started, the food was ready to eat.

I don’t usually eat much meat, but when traveling, my mantra is “be open,” which extends to both mind and mouth. Besides, I was ravenous! So I dug in, following the lead of others. We ate the meat with our hands, dipping pieces of wors in a sweet curry sauce, picking up the lamb chops like sandwiches, and plucking bites of wonderfully tender chicken off the skewers. For side dishes, there was also mealie pap, a kind of corn porridge served with tomato and onion sauce, and a salad replete with chunks of avocado (or just avo, as they call it).

Pretty tasty, but if I were braai-ing, I’d love to try some vegetables and fish, or even a pizza…

Courtesy of Flickr user JForth

It’s time for a new Inviting Writing topic. This month’s theme is one of my favorite summer activities—road trips.

The rules are simple: Tell us a true story that somehow relates to that theme (and food, of course), and e-mail it to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Road Trips” in the subject line. We’ll pick three of the best, lightly edit them and publish them over the next few Mondays here on the blog. For more guidance, please read this and peruse last month’s stories about “picnics.”

I’ll get things started with a story of my own. Surprisingly, as much as I love taking to the open road, the only food-related road trip story (actually, two) I could come up with isn’t very appetizing. Let’s see if some of the budding Jack Kerouacs out there can do better—it shouldn’t be hard.

ROAD TRIPS, or WHAT HAPPENS ON THE WAY TO VEGAS…

For my 30th birthday, a couple of good friends and I decided to take a road trip to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. We planned to gamble a little, sit by the pool, maybe see a show—nothing unusual. But my first indication that things weren’t going to go exactly as planned was that another friend, who had been living overseas, decided to surprise me by flying in to join us for the weekend trip. That was great, but the real surprise was that she also needed to crash at my cramped 1-bedroom apartment for the next month.

I shrugged off this unexpected twist and we were on our way. Driving from L.A. to Las Vegas on a Friday evening is rarely pleasant. A good portion of the 17 million or so inhabitants of the L.A. metropolitan area funnel onto the 10 and 15 freeways heading east, trying to get home to the suburbs or out to the desert for a weekend escape. A trip that would take about four hours without traffic can stretch to hours longer, as cars crawl along the blacktop.

I made my first gamble of the weekend before we even crossed the Nevada state line: hungry but not wanting to add more stops to our stop-and-go journey, I ate a sandwich from a national-chain sub shop located inside a gas station mini-mart.

A couple hours later, after the traffic had thinned and we were driving through the night on the lonesome desert highway, an ominous gurgling in my gut told me that I had made a bad bet. There was nowhere to stop for miles, and I wasn’t about to squat behind a tumbleweed in the dark, where I was sure rattlesnakes and scorpions were lurking. Luckily, a small cluster of lights soon appeared on the horizon, indicating my salvation—a clean public restroom—was near.

The only other time I experienced food-borne illness was also on a road trip, although not in the classic sense—I was on an overnight bus trip between Istanbul and the Cappadocia region of Turkey, during a solo European backpacking adventure in my 20s. This time, the fact that I was alone among strangers in an unfamiliar culture made the onset of the gut-gurgling even more disconcerting.

I was laid up for three or four days in the small village of Göreme with what some travelers call “Sultan’s Revenge.” During that time, multiple locals tried to cure me with home remedies—the pansiyon (guesthouse) owner urged me to drink a glassful of equal parts honey and water; the tour-office worker’s concoction included hot water, honey, lemon juice and salt; and the restaurant owner insisted that raki, the ever-present anise-flavored liquor, was the cure for what ailed me. A visit to the doctor, facilitated by the raki-pushing restauranteur, finally did the trick.

Other than the first day, during which I was feverish and bedridden, being sick may have actually been a positive thing in the long run. Forced to slow down and hang out in town rather than go out exploring the area’s tourist sites, I got to spend a good amount of time talking to the local Turkish people.

That’s the great thing about road trips—you don’t always know where they might lead you.

Where do Swedish Fish come from? Courtesy of Flickr user Brandy Shaul

For some reason, my husband always buys Swedish Fish to snack on when we take road trips. On our recent drive to Martha’s Vineyard, as I watched him bite the gummy fishes’ chewy red heads off, one after another, the thought occurred to me: do Swedish Fish really come from Sweden?

So when I got home I went to swedishfish.com, the official Web site for the Cadbury Adams–produced candy. The only explanation I could find there sounded like it was written by an 8th-grader trying to fake her way through an essay question on a pop quiz: “Swedish Fish have been around a long time. Most people enjoy them. Some don’t. They might change their minds one day.” Hmm, OK.

I went looking for slightly more informative source, and found something from Mental Floss magazine, the must-read publication for anyone who likes to know interesting facts about random stuff. According to a blog post there, Swedish Fish were originally manufactured by the Swedish confectionary company Malaco. Malaco made wine gums—gelatin-free candies that are stickier and less rubbery than gummy bears—in many shapes, but developed the fish shape specifically for its entrance into the North American market, in the late-1950s. Although Cadbury Adams now produces the fish here, Malaco still sells the fish-shaped candies in Sweden, where they are called “pastellfiskar.”

So, the answer to the question of whether Swedish Fish really originated in Sweden is yes, sort of. But what about other foods with a nationality in their names? Can you get a Danish in Denmark? English muffins in England? Here’s what I found:

German Chocolate Cake: NOT GERMAN. Having spent some time in Germany, I can confirm that Germans do make delicious chocolate cakes. But German chocolate cake is not the same as German Chocolate Cake, which is a moist chocolate cake layered with gooey, coconut-flake-filled frosting and which is an entirely American invention. The name comes from German’s chocolate, a brand of sweetened baking chocolate created by Samuel German for the Baker’s Chocolate Company in 1852. According to Kraft Foods, which now owns the Baker’s chocolate brand, the recipe for German’s Chocolate Cake first appeared in a Dallas newspaper in 1857.

English muffins: SORT OF ENGLISH. What Americans call English muffins are related to the English crumpet, which are spongier and are eaten whole rather than split into halves. According to Bimbo Bakeries USA, an Englishman named Samuel Bath Thomas brought the recipe for muffins baked on a hot griddle to the United States in 1874. It’s unclear, though, how close this recipe was to the current Thomas’ English Muffin product. In The Glutton’s Glossary, by John Ayto, the entry for muffins explains that the words “muffin” and “crumpet” were often confused or used interchangeably in 19th- and early 20th-century England, where the “muffin man” used to sell his baked wares from a cart. Although the recipes for those earlier muffins varied widely, Ayto writes, most probably bore little resemblance to the American English muffin, which was introduced (or re-introduced?) to England in the 1970s.

Danish pastry: AUSTRIAN, VIA DENMARK. In Denmark, according to Schulstad Royal Danish Pastry, the sweetened yeast-bread pastries we call Danishes are called wienerbrød, or Viennese bread. This is because they were originally brought to Denmark in the 19th century by Austrian bakers and Danish bakers who had worked in Austria. The Danish put their mark on the treats, however, making them flakier and crispier than the Viennese style.