Stump the Grocery Store Cashier

One way to liven up trips to the grocery store is to buy the most unusual produce you can find and then watch the cashier squirm as he tries to figure out what it is. I don't really do this intentionally, but it seems that a lot of the high school boys my grocery store employs aren't familiar with anything except apples, oranges, and carrots.

These little baby cauliflowers we had for supper last night certainly stumped the guy who checked us out. Each of the pieces in the picture were individual baby heads, not pieces cut off from a bigger head. The fact that they came in orange and purple just made them even cuter. When I saw them, I just had to buy them. We've bought purple and orange heads of regular cauliflower in the past, but I'd never seen the baby ones before. Tigger loves cauliflower, and I knew he'd love these. I steamed them and put a little butter and salt on them, and he gobbled them up.

(On a different but related note, one of my favorite memories of Piglet as a toddler occured when I served cauliflower for supper one night. He was always trying to teach Tigger, so he picked up a piece of cauliflower, held it up in front of Tigger's face, and said, "See this? This is called a flower." I don't know if comes out as funny in writing, but he used the same inflections as the word "cauliflower", and he clearly thought we were saying "called a flower" instead.)

The poor cashier we had this time was just really baffled by a lot of our food. We bought parsnips, too, which he rang up as rutabaga. I corrected him, since the price of rutabaga was $.70/pound less, but he told me, "Oh, I always do it this way. They're about the same." I guess I've never thought of parsnips and rutabaga as being about the same. I know that my family will eat the pot roast I'm making today with parsnips in it, but I don't know if they'd be as happy with rutabaga.

My favorite clueless cashier was the one who rang up some jicama a few years ago. Jicama is a yummy Mexican vegetable pronounced hee-cah-ma. The cashier held it up, got a dreamy look in his eyes, and said, "Can you believe that a week ago I didn't even know what jee-ca-ma-ma was?"