Spring 2013 Week 4 (April 16th) PLUS recipes

Pictures will follow later tonight, but here are the share lists (and a few recipes) for today:

SMALL
kohlrabi
baby turnips
baby rutabaga
collard greens
chard
asparagus
fingerling potatoes
parsnip
onion
spinach
roasted peppers (frozen)

MEDIUM
sorrel (aka lemon spinach)
mixed salad greens
extra chard
extra collards
extra baby turnips
extra baby rutabaga

A note on sorrel: This very “bright” green looks like pointy spinach, but it doesn’t taste like it. It is quite sour, but adds a nice flavor to salads, soups, and pestos. Store as you would spinach, loosely wrapped in a plastic bag with a paper towel added to keep it from wilting. Also see here for recommendations.

Root Veg Mash with caramelized onions
This will use four or five ingredients from the share today. Peel and cube the rutabaga and parsnips, and just cube the potatoes (unless you aren’t a fan of skins). You could add the turnips if you’d like. Boil the roots in salted water until tender enough to mash. In the meantime, saute a sliced onion and some minced garlic until the onions begin to brown. Drain the root cubes and mash with a bit of stock or cream, seasoned with thyme, salt, and pepper. Stir in the onions and serve.

Places to put collards, chard, and spinach
There are a lot of ideas for using up our greens here, from simply boiling them and serving, to sauteeing with garlic and putting over pasta. Sometimes I serve them as a side dish by themselves, but at least half the time I just slip them into other dishes. They pair well with eggs, so put ribbons of them into quiche, omelets, or frittata. I put one whole bunch of collards into a savory bread pudding with sausage this week (think stuffing as a main dish). I put them into soups quite a bit, especially chicken, vegetable, and minestrone style soups. Potato soups are good with crunchier kale and collards.

A few ideas to get the ball rolling

The Fruit Syrup
Refrigerate after opening.  Made with Zoe’s honey and berries.  This is fantastic on pancakes or scones, or on bread pudding made with day after Thanksgiving rolls / pastries (with the frozen strawberries?).  Or pour over ice cream.  Or make a reduction with white wine and… (something?  apples?)… to replace your cranberry sauce.

Apples and Rutabaga
Apparently, a four to one mix of sliced rutabaga and apples, lightly seasoned and oiled, makes for a very interesting tart.  A mix of sweet and savory, familiar and unfamiliar.

Galeux D’Eysines
This warty winter squash comes highly recommended for soups and pumpkin pies.  1 1/2 cups of cooked squash = one can of pumpkin puree.

Rutabaga, Parsnip, and a Sunchoke recap

Here are three of the less common veggies we’re getting this week, with some storage and use tips.  I’m trying to frontload the posts and give general ideas rather than specific recipes.

Rutabaga
A root vegetable, also called swedes (England) / yellow turnips (US) / turnips (Ireland) / neeps (Scotland), they are actually more closely related to cabbage.  To quote Samwise, “Roast ’em, Mash ’em, Stick ’em in a Stew.”  They have a flavor similar to turnips, but better.  You can use them interchangeably in root veg recipes — mash them with potatoes, put them in soups, roast them with other roots.  Store them loosely wrapped in plastic with your beets and turnips in the bottom of the fridge.  Fun fact:  The Irish traditionally carved rutabaga for Halloween (which was a Celtic holiday) — pumpkins were an American development.

Parsnips
They look like fat white carrots, but they’re sweeter and nuttier in flavor and richer in nutrition.  The centers can be woody if the weather was wrong, but those are still good for soups (remove the hard cores when ready to serve).  This is a fantastic veg to roast, and shines by itself.  Roast them with butter, cardamom, and coriander.  Another good use is to roast or mash them with the rutabaga and potatoes.

Sunchokes
I flogged this horse in the spring.  See here here and here.  We have a lot of interesting root veggies to roast or mash — these work there, too!