Once upon a time, I got it in my head that root vegetables were not tasty. Well, potatoes and sweet potatoes and carrots were fine, but parsnips? Turnips? Rutabagas? Honey, no. I was certain that they were bitter and nasty.
I’m not sure of the origin of this undeserved prejudice. Perhaps from a story I once heard about overcooked mashed turnips or from some novel about a poor heroine suffering from terrible deprivations and subsisting on the moldy remains from a root cellar. I certainly had never tasted them before. And until a couple of years ago, I never had any interest in trying them, either.
I think my interest in these funny vegetables was piqued on a visit to that foodie wonderland in Watertown, MA, Russo’s, one winter. Russo’s had heaps of these strange vegetables hanging about, and I wondered what one could do with them. They looked quite fresh — so very different from the shriveled versions one might find at the grocery store. My ever-patient and adventurous mother agreed that I could take some home to try, and so I gathered up some parsnips, a couple of rutabagas and a celeriac root.
Some days later, we incorporated them in Mom’s standard oven-roasted potatoes with chicken recipe. And what a revelation they were! The parsnips were far from bitter. In fact, they were sweeter than the carrots. The rutabagas tasted slightly of cabbage, and the celeriac of celery, but their mild flavors gave way to the salty deliciousness of the chicken juices in which they had been roasted. Needless to say, I was a convert.
Parsnips are great paired in soups with carrots, lending a certain sweetness and complexity, and turnips and rutabagas can be mashed together with potatoes for an interesting turn on an old favorite. But oven roasting is still my favorite way to prepare these delicious veggies. Recently, I modified a fantastic Cook’s Illustrated recipe (subscription required) to roast an enormous pile of potatoes, carrots, celery, leeks, parsnips and turnips. Their revelatory trick was to roast the veggies on their own, separate from the chicken I was pan roasting. About 25 minutes into the roasting process (at 500 F), the nearly cooked veggies were coated in the pan sauce from the chicken and returned to the oven for 5 more minutes. After 30 minutes in the oven, the veggies were perfectly cooked and had a lovely chicken taste that complemented their individual flavors so nicely. Yum yum yum.
Clacked by Molly B.
on Jan 22, 2009 @ 13:38 EST5EDT
We roast root veggies all the time. I wish I would time them, but it is probably 20-30 minutes at 400 degrees convection roast and they come out perfectly every time.
There are some foods that just get a bad rap for some reason. Prunes come to mind, as do turnips. I got on board the root veggie bandwagon several years ago when a Thanksgiving dinner I was making called for roasting potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots to be used in later parts of the menu. Trouble was, the roasted vegetables tasted better on their own than they did in the various recipes they were later incorporated into.
Subsequently, I started throwing every veggie I could think of into a roasting pan with excellent results. Then I decide to bravely advance to parsnips and – God forbid – TURNIPS!!! I was so pleasantly surprised! You’re right about parsnips – sweet like a carrot. Turnips, similar to an apple, but a little less sweet. Both of them, marvelous!
There are those people that say you can deep fry ANYTHING and it tastes good. I’m more inclined to say that you can ROAST anything and it will taste good