Recipes, produce information and forum for Zoe's Garden Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members. Zoe's Garden offers CSA subscriptions in the Park City, Heber, Salt Lake, Ogden & Lindon areas. Our purpose is to provide the freshest naturally grown produce possible by delivering it to our local members within a day of picking.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

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!

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