Magenta. While this is one of my favorite colors, I was not especially encouraged to find it in my bin. Dark pink skin paired with white tuberous flesh usually means radishes. It seems everyone has their problem vegetables. Radishes are mine. (As winter sets in expect a litany of posts where I whine about radishes.) My helpful decoder sheet says that these are actually turnips, scarlet turnips to be exact. I wonder briefly if they are in fact radishes in disguise. But I know that they are legitimate turnips because they have left the greens attached as evidence, sort of how you know you're actually being served yak meat in a restaurant - and not beef - because you can see the stringy, black tail still attached. We’re all red blooded yak eating Americans here, right?
I lobbed off the greens, which I mixed with my so enormous-Adam-and-Eve- (or Steve) -could have-used-them-instead-of-fig-leaves-collards and smoked turkey tail.
That leaves the turnips themselves. I can never think of anything to do with turnips, I normally dice and hide them in soups or rice dishes or anything else I can think of to save them from the compost bin. So I thought I could add one to what turned out to be a carrot stew. The contents: Five fresh carrots, garlic, half a cup of red wine, three or four medium-sized tomatoes, an orange habanero pepper, some chopped cilantro and some bits of carrot top (I’ve been experimenting with ways to use this fragrant, verdant part of the carrot. Future success may be achieved by slow cooking it so that it gets softer and more chewable.) - and one scarlet turnip.
This is the point in the story where I should mention that I love a bit of acid in my food. Probably a touch more than others are comfortable with. It hasn’t leeched into my personality has it? (I read some where that the desire for additional salt in a dish can be alleviated by introducing more acid.) However, the turnip seem to concentrate all of the acid from the tomatoes, wine and pepper, giving each bite a sour finish. The quinoa that I laddeled the stew over seemed to help a bit, but not quite enough. Even of the sweetness of the carrots were lost behind the taste of turnip.
The future is at ease that I know what not to do next time. But here in the present I still have four more turnips. Googling “scarlet turnip recipes” turned up: turnip slaw (cold), salad (cold), mashed turnips (warmer) ... fried turnips (ouch, I think I burned myself on the oil). So if you read my subject heading you know how this turns out. Slicing the turnips and frying them with garlic was amazing. It was almost like eating a fried potato except there was just a hint of something different, but I didn’t have long to ponder what it was because I was too busy shoveling food into my mouth.
From now on any problematic vegetable is getting thrown into hot oil. If this works, this may be my last blog entry. Beer battered cucumbers anyone?
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