Double Whammy!!

One of the things I love most is cooking. I don't just love cooking old favourites, I also really love putting on my chefs hat and trying something new. This is where I strike out sometimes. Not that the dishes turn out badly, the problem occurs long before that with the ingredients for the dish. Remember I am in Japan, and can't read Japanese labels on food. This makes life interesting when I go shopping. I am truly a foreigner in a foreign land. Recently I have tried 2 things that have flopped in the ingredients stage of preparation.
I have never had fennel, but have seen it on Martha Stewart's Everyday Food cooking show. I was pretty confident that I could recognize it, but had never seen it at the store here. I guess I should also let you know that the availability of a variety of produce is pretty bad. Don't get me thinking about my first trip to a grocery store when we get back. It will certainly include snatching up some good feta cheese, sausage, ketchup chips, Canadian milk!, etc. etc. Alright, I'm getting off track here, back to the story. One day at my thrifty grocery store called Gyomu, I saw fennel! I was totally pumped. I picked it up and planned to use it that night for a recipe I had seen on Everyday Food. Come dinner time, I sliced into this great new adventure of a vegetable, only to be met with a potent onion fragrance. I tasted it. It was most certainly a very strong member of the onion family. But I promise it looked just like this:

We ate spaghetti :(
And yet again, the trick of the un-rhubarb fooled me. I spotted something at the grocery store that so closely resembled rhubarb that it couldn't be anything else....
Just tonight I mixed up the pie dough so it could chill while I cut the fruit for my rhubarb-apple pie. UMMMM. Sounds good, right? Well, maybe it's good that I taste all the ingredients before cooking them because this was NOT rhubarb. It was so bitter and had a disgusting flavour. I was expecting to pucker my lips from the beautiful bite of a piece of sour rhubarb. WRONG. BLAH. I guess it's good that I had a good day today. It's easier to laugh about un-rhubarb and onion-fennel bulbs when you're happy to start out with. Here's the real thing:

Come to think of it, mine was quite green. But you can have green rhubarb, right?
Maybe the appropriate motto for this problem is, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!" I would do something with these veggies, but I don't even know what they are..... Good thing the pie dough can be chilled for up to two days. I'll venture out to find some familiar fruit tomorrow.