Turnips Anna

Last week we got a whole bag of turnips in our share. Turnips!

Pommes Anna is a French dish of thinly sliced potatoes, baked in a cocotte à pommes Anna (or, you know, a skillet) with lots of butter to form a cake. (The Epicurious recipe has exactly two ingredients: potatoes and butter).

Martha extends the dish to include rutabaga in her "roots Anna," and her somewhat more complicated recipe was the one I happened on first. I substituted turnips for the rutabaga, used our whole bag of turnips instead of a mere two pounds, and felt extremely dubious that a turnip dish was going to be an appealing centerpiece at dinner.

An hour later ... I was impressed. I wasn't daring enough to try to turn the cake out of the pan, but the slices were tender and buttery, and purply and deeply caramelized on the bottom, and probably the best turnips I've ever cooked (no, that's not a high bar). Not a leftover turnip to be seen this morning.

I'm pretty sure you could use any combination of roots and tubers you have on hand (potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, celeriac, parsnips). Slice them as thinly as possible, and arrange the slices in concentric circles in the bottom of a buttered ovenproof skillet. Add salt, pepper, and more butter between each layer. Cover the top layer with foil, weigh it down (Martha suggests putting a cast iron pan on top), and bake for an hour at 450 degrees. If you're brave, try to turn it out of the skillet.

Remarketing Borscht

Our farmers at Picadilly braved 18 inches of snow to bring us "borscht in a box" last week: beets, turnips, carrots, onions, cabbage, and potatoes.

We made borscht last year to use up our beets and cabbage and root vegetables, so I was pretty comfortable winging it as "vegetable soup that happens to contain beets and maybe is partially pureed" (how I make soup) this time.

But still, announcing "borscht" made the potluck guests uneasy. Housemates hovered in the kitchen to supervise what went into the pot. Some declared, bravely, their determination to try it. Another brought vodka.

We'd accumulated some beets and quite a bit of cabbage from previous weeks, so we made, um, sort of a lot. (Cf. the Canadian idiom "Cheap like borscht.")

Having a lot of unpopular magenta soup is not a plight unique to our refrigerator. In the Wall Street Journal, the borscht-making Gold family brainstorms new ways to sell their trademark project:

"It needs a totally new look to it," Steven Gold declares. "A sexy look." He advocates taking the word "borscht" out of the equation altogether. Call the product "Beet Smoothie," he suggests. "Power Beet Juice," offers Howard Gold.

And, in response, some (apparently earnest) suggestions on "making borscht cool again":

My key suggestion is to target babies and toddlers with a baby food (e.g. steamed and pureed beats) and a fun children’s borscht. This could be a very strategic move that makes beets and borscht a normal (and fun) part of childhood ... To target a very different audience than the Whole Foods crowd, I could imagine trying to get Borscht the official drink of an ultimate fighter or WWE wrestler. 

Jack, however, discovered the best marketing strategy for leftover borscht: combine it with cheese sauce.

Neeps, and Tatties, and Haggis (?!), Oh My!

We had turnips and we had potatoes ... so obviously it was time for neeps and tatties.

Neeps and tatties is Scots for "turnips and potatoes," with the caveat that what the Scottish call "turnips" are what the English call "swedes," which are what we Americans call "rutabagas."

The traditional recipe for neeps and tatties is to boil and mash each separately (but been there, done that), so we did this mustard-roasted potatoes recipe from Smitten Kitchen, instead.

The standard accompaniment for neeps and tatties is haggis, that delectable product of Scottish ingenuity combining sheep entrails, oatmeal, and whiskey boiled in the sheep's stomach.

Of course, as with all good meaty things, there are vegetarian variations as well. Jack pointed out that vegetarian "haggis" is pretty much our standard Mark Bittman veggie burger with a dash of whiskey. He also agreed to wear a kilt if I made some.

Here's a great Australian narrative about haggis and the making of it, which includes the recipe I ultimately ended up following. We also had some bacon that needed eating, though, so our vegetarian "haggis" is actually double-scare-quotes "vegetarian" "haggis."

We didn't make the tomato sauce described in the recipe, but ketchup and barbecue sauce made good additions to a haggis our audience judged ... marginally edible.

Shepherd's Pie

What I love about this house is that I can come home from work, announce "I was thinking of making a shepherd's pie," and rustle up enough sous chefs to have one on the table in an hour. (This is a speedy inspired-by-Rachael-Ray version, not a takes-three-hours Gourmet Magazine version.)

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

0:00 -- Start water boiling for potatoes. Peel potatoes and cut into smallish chunks. Dump into the water.
0:05 -- Wash and peel vegetables for the filling. We used onions, carrots, parsnips, and turnips.
0:10 -- Vegetables start going into a pan on the stovetop as they're ready. Saute in oil (or steam, as the pan starts getting overly full).

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.


0:10 -- Start making the gravy. (You guys know I always delegate sauce-making projects to Jack; if he weren't around I might have used canned gravy or a can of cream of mushroom soup.) Start with a flour-butter roux, add vegetable broth, consider some cornstarch to thicken, then dress up with salt, pepper, rosemary, or other flavors to taste.
0:15 -- Fork potatoes. If tender enough to mash, drain. Let cool for a moment.
0:20 -- Mash potatoes with milk, butter, salt and pepper, or your favorite accompaniments.
0:25 -- Add frozen or canned vegetables (edamame, peas, corn) to pan of sauteed veggies. We didn't, but herbs would be good at this point, too.

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

0:30 -- Assemble the shepherd's pie. Spoon the sauteed vegetables into a baking dish, pour the gravy over, and then spread the mashed potatoes on top.
0:35 -- Top with cheese, bread crumbs, or anything that sounds good. (We had extra-locally-grown chives, which had popped up in our backyard by surprise.)
0:40 -- Into the oven (400 degrees) for a bit to warm through and melt the cheese. (Not strictly necessary.)
0:55 -- Under the broiler to brown the top. (Also not strictly necessary.)

Et voila!

Winter Vegetable Borscht

We had beets, so it was time to make borscht. According to James Meek, this was not without geopolitical implications:

What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch?

(The full article from the Guardian is worth reading for murder, intrigue, travelogue, etc.)


As usual, we got the basic recipe from Epicurious (Beet and Cabbage Borscht), following the reader suggestions to increase the proportion of vegetables to broth, to omit the tomatoes, to add apple cider vinegar as well as lemon juice, and not puree the soup at the end.

A local blogger's Ukrainian-style borscht recipe gave us the confidence to throw in all our accumulated winter CSA vegetables: beets, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips/rutabagas, onions.

(Caution: Housemate Liz insisted to us 1) that she doesn't like borscht, and 2) that borscht is white. These claims seemed so absurd that we were forced to research them. It turns out Liz finds our borscht delectable and that there is a Polish white borscht, which has no beets but which includes such delicious ingredients as "sausage cooking water, fat removed" and hard-boiled eggs.)

P.S. I also made Mark Bittman's whole-wheat muffins with a last, giant, slightly bruised CSA apple to accompany the copious borscht leftovers.

Roasted Winter Vegetable Curry

Our usual solution for accumulated winter root vegetables is to peel and cube them and roast them all together (tossed with salt and oil, roasted at about 400 degrees for, say, 30 minutes for fairly small dice). This week we've been eating a mixture of squashes (butternut and delicata), turnips, beets, parsnips, carrots, and sweet potatoes we roasted on Monday.

Usually we eat our roasted vegetables plain (or seasoned with herbs/lime juice/cook's choice) as a side dish, but this week, Jack made the leftovers into a curry that proved immensely popular (and used the two underripe tomatoes we got in our box a couple weeks ago, to boot).

I'm told that the recipe is alarmingly simple:

• Dice the underripe tomatoes and cook them into submission in a large pan. Push them to the side of the pan.

• Fry a bunch of curry powder in the pan until fragrant. (Our house asserts that Indian spices taste better cooked--and cooking them certainly makes the kitchen smell like curry. If your lover doesn't like smelling curry in your hair hours later, adjust to taste.) Mix the curry powder with the tomato sauce.

• Add the mixed roasted vegetables.

• Add cream and coconut flakes (or coconut milk in place of both, if your kitchen is better stocked for Indian cooking than ours on a random Tuesday). Season to taste with salt, cayenne pepper, and additional curry powder to taste.

• Serve over rice.

(The chef speculates that you should use yogurt or something tangier than cream if your tomatoes are not underripe. Judging from the amenability of curry to the flavor of underripe tomatoes, he also speculates, correctly, that there must exist some kind of green tomato curry.)

Again, apologies for limited posting: December has been more about travel than home cooking. I've been enjoying childhood favorites and Midwestern specialties like green Jello salad (with mini marshmallows and canned fruit cocktail), which underscored just how much my eating habits have changed since I've moved to Boston (much less started subscribing to a CSA and living in a co-op). Now when I read a blog post about someone buying 80 bunches of kale, I'm not like, "how weird," but instead, "hey, I know that guy."