"When all else fails, boil it."

I hit up the local market -- okay, so it was a Food Lion, but I did buy a mess of sweet potatoes, onions, and rutabagas earlier that morning -- last Saturday, and while there bought a jicama.

I took it to the counter, where the clerk, a young woman in her early 20s, looked a little flummoxed.

"Is this a mushroom?"

"No ma'am...I think it's a 'hee-com-ah.' (I like to call people younger than me "sir" or "ma'am," turn the tables a little bit.)

"A who?"

"Hee-com-ah," I said. She consulted her rotary wheel of produce codes.

"What is it, though?"

"It's kind of like a potato," I said. "It might be under 'gee-com-ah.'"

"What...how do you cook it?"

"I'm not quite sure, I said," explaining that I was planning to go home and look online, maybe roast it or make a nice slaw.

She looked at me like I was crazy. She then called her friend over.

"Look at this...jicama. You ever heard of that?"

"Looks like a turnip," the woman said. "How do you cook it?"

"I'm not all that sure," I said. "I just saw it and thought I'd try it out." She too looked at me like I was crazy...what kind of person, she must have thought, buys food just to experiment with it? When they don't even know what it is, really?

"I didn't even know we had them," the first woman said.

"Well, *someone* must eat them," I said.

"Spanish people," the woman said plainly. "Well, anyway, good luck with that."

"Thanks," I said, walking away, feeling like a cultural pelt collector.

"I say you just boil it," the second woman called out to me. "When all else fails, boil it."