Gentrification
Here's a favorite joke of mine. “How do you know if someone is vegan? Don't worry. They'll tell you.” I live in a neighborhood in Los Angeles that has changed dramatically over the last 10 or 15 years.
It used to be a quiet little jewel full of hills and old Spanish-style houses inhabited by artists, gay people, and Hispanic families, who were the first occupants dating back to the 40's and 50's. There were two restaurants I could walk to on Sunset Boulevard, one is a fish place, incredibly cheap, giant portions, and the other a bakery with excellent cheap coffee and these pastries they made with guava paste and cream cheese. The fish place has been gone for years, and there have been easily 5 or 6 different eateries there, the last of which was a plain diner with a decent burger and good omelets. It just closed last week. Now there are easily 50 restaurants to choose from right around the corner. Every other store front is a place to eat, and they all have one-word names...'Forage', 'Botanica', 'Sqirl'.
A lot of them are excellent, but they all are expensive, and many boast vegan specialties, gluten-free choices, free-range this and that. They appeal to the new breed of inhabitant in the neighborhood, young and wealthy and just plain awful. These kids clearly don't have jobs because they're out in these places all day with laptops open, or texting each other at the same table. Now I make it a point to drive a few miles away to eat out at the authentic places I prefer, where they fry beans in lard, and people are having conversations with each other, and you can get a meal for $15.00.
But I want to talk about jicama, which you can probably find most everywhere now...maybe not Kansas, but still. It's an ugly root vegetable...looks something like a potato, and it tastes like a radish or an apple. A good one is juicy and sublime. Over a pile of jicama at the market one day I had a young girl ask me how choose a good one. 'Well, probably a smooth skin, and hard flesh...nothing bruised-looking or soft in spots'. She said 'Oh. Just like a man.' That's a good rule of thumb for all kinds of choosing I thought. This is a relish that should sit atop a piece of salmon or some other animal, but if you insist, you could just have it on a corn tortilla.
Corn and Jicama Relish
1 small jicama root, peeled and diced fine (about 1 cup)
3 plum tomatoes, diced fine
Corn kernels from 2 ears of corn, raw (about 1 ½ cups)
1 tablespoon seasoned rice wine vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ teaspoon cumin powder
¼ cup finely-chopped cilantro
Place all ingredients in non-reactive bowl and stir. Let sit for an hour. A word about cilantro. It has a very strong flavor that some people abhor. You can use Italian parsley in this relish instead. It will create a different over-all flavor....rather more east coast than west.