Jujubes and Adventures Cooking on the Go (A.I. Powered Home Cooking)

This probably isn’t common, but do you ever itch to cook while you’re traveling? Call me weird, but I do, and that’s why I bring a minimal set of cookware when I travel. What can I say? I have my priorities.

While cooking isn’t something you’d normally think of doing when you travel, my latest escapade was brought on by the extra goodies I collected in the skies. I often run into a “problem” of accumulating too many little snacks that flight attendants handout, like cookies, crackers, breads, jams, and juices. It’s as if they’re worried we’d starve or something. I wish there wasn’t a constant stream of snacks, because by the time I arrive at my destination, I’ve usually collected a surplus of calories. I’m a sucker for free stuff, and free food is the most tempting of all. Coming from a family of immigrants, I still remember stories my grandmother told me about famine, when she ate mud so she wouldn’t feel hungry, and the only nutrients available came from tree bark. Those survival instincts to collect and save as much food as possible unfortunately no longer serve me in the modern food environment.

While I’ve gotten better at turning down free food, I’ve come to accept that I will always have something extra here and there. And, it’s nice to know that if my husband or I get hungry while on the road, there’s something to nibble on. So on our most recent trip to Singapore, we collected an extraneous box of orange juice, a mini jar of marmalade, and a half cup of black cherry yogurt.

After we arrived and made up for our sleep deficit, we went hunting for real food. To me, grocery stores are mandatory to visit in every country. If I haven’t seen what’s offered to locals at their supermarkets, I don’t consider having really visited their country. My favorite section is the fresh produce area. This is where I look for ingredients I’ve never seen before. The more alien the better. And, if I can eat it, I will buy it. And as usual, the first market I walked into did not disappoint. I stumbled upon some fresh winter dates that I was compelled to try. These dates are also known as red Chinese dates or jujubes, which is how I like to refer to them since that’s how our family always called them. Despite the name, as it turns out, they’re nothing close to a plump, chewy medjool date from Saudi Arabia. Instead, they are waxy and tough, almost like crinkled up plastic forgotten in a mediocre dessert. They have a unique, pleasant, floral scent, but the skin’s texture is super distracting, because it’s impossible to chew and swallow without discomfort in your mouth.

Even though jujubes are pretty commonplace in Chinese cuisine, I’m still confused by the Chinese obsession with red dates. As a kid, my exposure to them was only the dried, haggard-looking kind. I didn’t see a point in their existence, but they were often added to dishes for health reasons based on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The sole benefit I saw was the roughage it provided. When it comes to Chinese desserts, their texture is a weak area that I’m surprised any tiger mom would tolerate. Usually I picked out and ate the red plastic turds first, just to get the torture over with (I wasn’t allowed to be a picky eater).

Consequently, I thought maybe there would be something special about fresh jujubes, but even they have a waxy, unappetizing skin, just like their dried brethren! They obviously have more moisture inside, similar to an apple. The pit is shaped like all date pits, but unlike the superior, Middle Eastern dates, the flesh of a jujube sticks to its pit, making it tough to remove from the fruit.

With only a handful of ingredients, a limited set of kitchen tools, and some back and forth brainstorming with ChatGPT, I ultimately decided to cook the jujubes down with the orange juice and marmalade. I think ChatGPT was just as flummoxed as I was by the task at hand, and with the ingredients and tools available. At one point in our conversation, it suggested I make the following:

I apologize for misunderstanding! Here's a revised recipe that uses orange juice instead of oranges: 
 
Winter Date and Orange Juice Salad Recipe 
 
Ingredients: 
250g winter dates, pitted and chopped 
1 cup orange juice 
1 tbsp jam (any flavor you like) 
1/2 cup plain yogurt 
1/4 cup chopped walnuts 
 
Instructions: 
In a mixing bowl, whisk together the orange juice, jam, and plain yogurt until well combined. 
Add the chopped winter dates to the bowl and toss to coat them evenly with the dressing. 
Arrange the winter date mixture on a serving plate. 
Sprinkle the chopped walnuts over the salad. 
Serve immediately and enjoy! 
This salad is refreshing and perfect for a hot day, the sweetness of the dates and orange juice, combined with the tanginess of the yogurt and jam, make for a delicious and healthy treat.

That was a hard no. Clearly it doesn’t know the definition of a salad, although dishes are sometimes labeled a salad when they bear little resemblance to an actual salad. Still, I count this as an LLM (large language model) failure, but I was asking for the impossible, so I’m not surprised. It did generate one intriguing recipe: Stove-top Winter Date Pudding. It sounds like a good idea, until you read the instructions.

Great question! There are many delicious recipes that you can make using a microwave and stove. Here's a simple recipe for a stove-top winter date pudding: 
 
Stove-Top Winter Date Pudding Recipe 
 
Ingredients: 
250g winter dates, pitted and chopped 
1 cup water 
1/2 cup all-purpose flour 
1/2 cup granulated sugar 
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened 
1 large egg 
1 tsp baking powder 
1/4 tsp salt 
1 tsp vanilla extract 
 
Instructions: 
In a medium-sized saucepan, bring the chopped winter dates and water to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10-15 minutes until the dates have softened and the mixture has thickened. 
In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat well. 
In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. 
Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar mixture, alternating with the date mixture. Mix well until everything is well combined. 
Return the saucepan to the stove and heat the mixture over medium heat, stirring continuously, until it comes to a boil. 
Reduce the heat to low and spoon the pudding mixture into the saucepan, covering the date mixture completely. 
Cover the saucepan with a lid and let it simmer for 20-25 minutes or until the pudding is cooked through. 
Remove the lid and let the pudding cool for a few minutes before serving it warm, garnished with some whipped cream, if desired. 
Enjoy your delicious stove-top winter date pudding!

Another LLM fail. It makes no sense to cream butter and sugar and then put it on the stove top. The whole point of creaming butter and sugar is to beat air into the batter so when it gets baked, it rises. No, no, no! ChatGPT knows nothing about baking or cooking. Do not follow the recipes in this post! They’re a disaster and a huge waste of ingredients and time.

With ChatGPT leaving me hanging, I was on my own. I didn’t have many ingredients available, and I didn’t want to purchase more just to try the ideas ChatGPT had generated. I decided the best solution was probably also the simplest one. I would stew the jujubes in OJ and jam. This simple solution worked marvelously and it filled up our apartment with sweet scent memories of longevity peaches–a steamed bun stuffed with jujube paste, formed in the shape of a peach, and made to celebrate a senior’s longevity. I will admit that this Chinese pastry is delicious, especially when the paste is silky smooth and not too sweet.

After simmering the dates for 1–2 hours, I began to appreciate the humble jujube. They’re the perfect fruit to make into a paste! This must’ve been what ancient people did with the fruit long ago. As it turns out, jujubes disintegrate when cooked long enough, so there’s no need for a blender. I was just cursing myself for not having an immersion blender handy, but lucky me, I didn’t need modern technology to create that desirable velvet texture in date paste. I discovered the old school way. Just pass it through a sieve to remove the tough skin bits, and pitting them even becomes an unnecessary step!

Unfortunately I didn’t have a sieve, but I knew the date paste had the right consistency to stuff into a bun. I also didn’t have bun ingredients or the time and effort necessary to make the dough in an AirBnB, so I commandeered a frozen steamed bun stuffed with mushrooms that my husband brought home and hollowed out its stuffing for my date paste. I thought this was rather resourceful of me!

But the ultimate question is: How did it taste? Not bad. It wasn’t the same thing because of the OJ and jam, but it was good, especially given the objective of using up random food items I collected on an eight hour flight. I would’ve liked it better if it was just jujube. The tanginess from the juice and the bitterness from the marmalade made it so different that I couldn’t really compare it against its original inspiration. Without a fair comparison, I’ll have to make pure date paste from fresh jujubes again on another date😉!