Spring 2020 Week 8 (May 27th)

Clockwise from to left: Young napa cabbages, mung bean sprouts, garlic, beets, kale, romain lettuce (barely pictured), broccoli, turnip greens, spinach, bok choy. Center: red onion, yellow onion, yukon gold potatoes, sunchoke.

Medium Add: collard greens, more baby napa cabbages, more mung bean sprouts, more turnip greens, more spinach, miniature romain, kohlrabi, broccolini, radishes.

To use up those delicate sprouts tonight I just found this Korean one pot dinner that also uses kale.  If you don’t have/like the spice paste, just sesame oil and salt is a good topping. Jerusalem artichoke/sunchoke doesn’t need to be peeled. Try roasting with beets and potatoes for side dish. This link has many more ideas for them. And I’ve posted this on the Instagram account, but I’ll link this chickpea soup especially good with curly leaf kale, it’s called The Stew. For medium shares the radishes, cabbage, and kohlrabi will go well in a slaw together.

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!