Sauteed Turnips and Carrots

Turnips again. But so very good that they deserve their own post, even though this is similar to at least two other recipes already on here. So in case you have these ingredients on hand and need something quicker than roasting, the combination of sauteing and then steaming works beautifully, allowing the veggies to caramelize and cook through in just a few minutes.

Plus, this is the sort of dish that gets even better if you accidentally forget about it for a couple of minutes and almost burn the bottom. Which is basically my favorite sort of dish (the "of course I meant to do that" kind).

Ingredients
1 stalk green garlic, chopped (or sub 1 clove garlic, pressed)
3-4 yellow turnips, peeled, halved (or quartered if large) and sliced about 1/8" thick
4-5 red carrots, scrubbed and sliced
Olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground white pepper
1 tbsp chopped flat leaf parsley

Heat a glug of olive oil in a saute pan over medium heat. Add the turnip and carrot slices, and toss to coat with oil. Continue sauteing for a minute or two, then add the green garlic and stir. Cover the pan and allow to steam as it browns on the bottoms (about 2-3 minutes). Stir, cover, and repeat. The vegetables should release some juices that allow them to steam, but if and when they start to look a little dry, add a pinch or two of salt to coax some liquid out.



Add a tbsp or two of water, cover, turn heat to low, and steam until nicely browned and very tender. Toss with white pepper and parsley to taste, and serve hot.

Serves 2.

Starlitta Salad with Carrot and Radish

We found a bag full of springy, light, fresh-flavored greens in our CSA box labeled starlitta (although I haven't been able to track them down on the Google, so they may usually be called something else). But this light salad would work with other microgreens or a mix of mild baby greens, as well.

Ingredients
Two large handfuls of greens
2 carrots, grated
1 medium daikon (white radish), grated
Olive oil & balsamic vinegar

Whisk a generous couple glugs of olive oil and about a third as much balsamic vinegar in a small bowl to form an emulsion. Lightly coat the greens with the vinaigrette, but reserve 1-2 spoonfuls. Arrange greens in salad bowls or plates, sprinkle generously with carrot and radish, and drizzle a little of the remaining vinaigrette over the top.

Serves 2 .

Roasted Yellow Turnips and Red Carrots

We found yellow turnips and red carrots in our CSA box last week, and fell in love. Yellow turnips seem to be creamier and less bitter than their plain white cousins, and the red carrots were especially carroty and sweet. For this recipe, you want to end up with about equal parts carrot and turnip once sliced.

Ingredients
4-5 short, fat carrots, brushed and sliced
2-4 yellow turnips, peeled, halved lengthwise, and sliced
Olive oil
1-2 cloves garlic, pressed
Small handful flat leaf parsley, chopped

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Toss the veggies with the olive oil and garlic in a baking dish or roasting pan sized so that the veggies are about an inch deep. Roast in the oven for 25-40 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes, until lightly browned and soft. Season with parsley and salt to taste, stir, and serve.

Simple Daikon and Carrot Salad

This is a snap to prepare, and the toasted sesame seeds give it a little zip. It goes well with fish, and was a quick and easy way to pair some plants with our takeout sushi earlier this week.

Ingredients
Carrots and daikon, in equal parts, peeled
Black sesame seeds

Toast sesame seeds in a pan over medium heat until fragrant, shaking the pan or stirring from time to time. Meanwhile, coarsely grate the carrot and daikon and toss together in a bowl. Top with sesame seeds, and serve.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Carrots and Parsley

Found in our produce box: Purple (!) sweet potatoes
Found at the coop: The freshest, crunchiest carrots imaginable


Ingredients
2 orange or purple sweet potatoes, peeled
3-4 purple, white, or orange carrots, peeled
A handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Salt and freshly-ground white pepper*
Olive oil


Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Cut the sweet potatoes crosswise into 3/4-inch thick slices, then halve or quarter each slice into bite-sized pieces. Cut the carrots crosswise into 1-inch pieces. Toss with olive oil and a pinch of salt, and throw in a small roasting pan (I used a loaf pan, so that they were several layers deep and crowded together).

Roast in the oven for 40-50 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes. About halfway through, turn the heat down to 400 and add a little more olive oil if the pan has gotten dry.

When the sweet potatoes are very soft and the carrots are just tender and a little browned, remove from the oven and toss with a little more salt, a liberal dousing of freshly ground white pepper, and some parsley. Serve hot, with a little parsley sprinkled over the top.

Serves 2-3.

*If you don't have a grinder full of white peppercorns, get one. I'm swiftly become a white pepper fanatic, but freshly ground versus not is just as different in this case as it is for black pepper, which actually never occurred to me until my husband brought home a bottle of white peppercorns. It's particularly good with squash, pumpkin, and sweet potatoes, because it gives sweet things a hint of pepper that blends with the sweetness instead of overpowering it.

The Rehabilitation of the Beet

We are not exactly a beet-loving household. We tolerate them from afar -- in Spain, for example, they sometimes place a beet on an otherwise perfectly acceptable veggie sandwich, and we are fine with that (as long as we are not actually in Spain). But up close -- in the same country, for instance -- they become decidedly more troubling. Let's put it this way: there are only three things in the world that my husband won't eat, and the beet is one of them.

But we knew they were coming. It's that time of year. So when they showed up in our CSA box this week, we did not jump, or scream. We calmly extracted them from the box, turned, and stuffed them safely in the back of the vegetable drawer, buried under a heap of parsley, carrots, radishes, and about six other things we managed to cram in on top of them. We returned to our lives, and did not think about beets. Or rather, we thought about not thinking about beets. We tried not to think about not thinking about beets. We thought about beets.

We could, we reasoned, try the beets. A little, tiny, modicum of beets. A beetlette. We could try a beetlette, mixed in with other things, and see if maybe it wouldn't be quite so beety. And a fellow beetophobe had suggested trying them raw, rather than cooked, which would make them less beety as well. We could try a raw, practically infinitesimal, highly camouflaged bit of a beet, and see. Yes. We would do that. We would do that, and see, and then we could never ever ever eat beets ever again.

Except that after all that, we kind of liked them.

Ingredients
Baby greens
Olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Sherry vinegar
2-3 lemon cucumbers, peeled, quartered, and sliced
1 cup cooked chickpeas
2 radishes, halved, sliced, then turned crosswise and sliced into thin strips
1 beet, peeled and grated
1-3 carrots, peeled and grated
2 medium- or hard-boiled pastured eggs, quartered

Whisk together a generous dousing of olive oil with about a third as much vinegar to form an emulsion, and add a pinch of salt and black pepper to taste. Toss the greens with enough of the vinaigrette to lightly coat them (you'll also want a little more vinaigrette to drizzle over the salad, so save a bit or make more if necessary).

Arrange a heaping bed of greens on each plate, then layer on the cucumbers, radishes, and chickpeas. Sprinkle liberally with the grated beets and carrots, and drizzle a couple more spoonfuls of vinaigrette over the top. Add the egg on top or on the side, sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

Serves 2 hungry beetophobes as the main part of a meal, or more as a side salad.

Easy Roasted Veggies

Swimming in a sea of swiftly approaching deadlines? Toss your plants in the oven while you type madly on your computer. I can't think of a vegetable that wouldn't be good roasted, although surely there must be something. Lettuce, I suppose. Please do not roast your salad. But yes on root vegetables, or cauliflower, or practically anything else. Cut them into chunks, toss with olive oil, a pinch of salt, and some freshly ground black pepper, and roast in the oven at 400-425 degrees for 30-45 minutes or until nicely browned and tender, stirring every 10-15 minutes or so.

Play around with spreading them out in a wider pan versus clumping them together several layers deep -- layering keeps them moist, but if they stay too wet, they won't brown as nicely. (My turnips tonight ended up getting wetter than I expected, so halfway through, I spread them out more sparsely in the pan, and they soon turned golden (and purple, due to the purple carrots, which ended up looking kind of neat).

Side note: I notice, upon rereading the preceding paragraph, a distinct lack of grammatical correctness, or at the very least a glaring absence of a second closing parenthesis. This is because my brainpower has been usurped by the aforementioned deadlines. I take no responsibility. None.

Onward, then: Turnips are particularly good with a little pressed garlic thrown in, and I always love huge pans full of roasted root veggies this time of year (turnips, parsnips, carrots, yams, potatoes, fennel bulb, you name it -- mix with olive oil and garlic, then add a bit of chopped parsley just before you serve). Roast cauliflower until tender and sprinkle with a tiny bit of ground cumin and some ñora pepper. Eat. Enjoy. Thumb your nose at the evil deadlines.


P.S. Found it:    )

Carrots with Cumin and Mustard Seeds

I have this pet suspicion that anyone who says they don't really like vegetables must be thinking of the boiled, steamed, or canned variety.

As soon as you toss a carrot or bean or zucchini in some olive oil and put it over high enough heat to start browning, transubstantiatory and addictive things start to happen. We've definitely tucked away a full pan of oven-roasted root vegetables in a single evening between the two of us, and a single vegetable cooked on the stovetop really doesn't stand a chance of making it to the leftover phase. So if you feel a certain dispassionate aloofness toward the carrot, try cooking this. It may be that underneath your calm and cool exterior, you love them, deeply and madly.

Ingredients
Carrots (preferably fresh, carroty ones from a farmer's market or CSA box), cut into sticks
Olive oil
A spoonful of black mustard seeds
A small spoonful of cumin seeds
 



Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat. When hot, add the mustard and cumin seeds, stir once, and add the carrots. Use tongs to toss the carrots with the seeds until they are evenly coated, then add a tbsp or so of water, cover the pan, and turn the heat to medium.






Continue cooking, adding a spoonful of water from time to time if the pan gets too dry and turning the carrots occasionally, until they're just tender and starting to caramelize a nice goldeny brown color on the bottom (you'll want to adjust the heat up if they don't seem to be browning, and down if they start to brown too quickly). Sprinkle with a pinch of salt, and serve.

Late Night Snack: Carmelized Ginger Carrots with Honey and Pastured Butter

Ingredients
Olive oil
6-7 fresh carrots, brushed clean and sliced at an angle*
A 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced into matchsticks
Pastured butter
Local wildflower honey

*fresh meaning the kind that taste like carrots, rather than the Safeway variety. We found rainbow carrots at a produce stand a few days ago, and still had some orange and yellow ones left.

Heat a little olive oil in a saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the carrots, stir once or twice, and sprinkle the ginger over (if it falls in clumps, try to break it up before it cooks together). Keep cooking, stirring from time to time, for a minute or two, then add about 2 tbsp of water, cover pan, and let steam for a couple minutes. Stir, add another couple of tablespoons of water, and cover again. (You want the carrots to brown, so it shouldn't be too wet, but the steam will help them cook through more quickly). When the carrots are a little browned and tender but not mushy, add a bit of butter (maybe a half tablespoon or so) to the pan and stir to coat the carrots as it melts. Turn off the heat, then add about 1/2 tbsp honey to the side of the pan. As soon as it begins to bubble, stir it through the carrots, and serve.

Quinoa with Carrots and Pepper

This made a nice, simple, protein-laden backdrop to the other things we were cooking tonight (collard greens with applewood smoked bacon, above, and grilled vegetables. You can use the quinoa like a bed of rice and let them mix together a bit). If you wanted to make it more flavorful, you could use broth instead of water, and/or saute the vegetables separately and add them to the cooked quinoa at the end. 

Ingredients
Olive oil
1/4 green bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, pressed
4 scallions, sliced (white and light green parts) or 1/2 cup onion, chopped
1/2 carrot, diced
2 handfuls Eden Organic canned chickpeas
Pinch or two of salt
1 scant tsp finely chopped oregano
1 cup red quinoa
1 1/4 cups water
2 tbsp toasted sliced almonds (Trader Joe's does this for you, if you like having them on hand...they keep forever in the freezer)
Small tab (about 1/2 tsp) pasture butter

Rinse the quinoa, then soak it in cold water for 30 minutes (or hot water for 10, if you forget to do this ahead of time and are impatient for dinner. Hypothetically speaking). This helps remove the saponin, which coats the quinoa grains and can make them taste bitter, and also makes the quinoa cook more quickly later on.

Heat the olive oil in a smallish pot over medium heat. Add the pepper, garlic, and scallions, and saute for a couple of minutes, then add the carrot, chickpeas, salt, and half the oregano and saute for another minute or two. Add the quinoa, stir a few times, then add the water and bring to a boil. Turn heat down to low or just above low and simmer for 15 minutes or until quinoa is done (if there is extra liquid left at the end, uncover pot and cook for a minute over medium heat to let it evaporate). Add remaining oregano and stir. Add almonds, switch off heat, stir in the butter, and serve.

Serves 3 (or 2 with some leftovers)