Parsnips can be peeled, sliced, and sautéed or steamed like carrots. You can boil and mash them with butter and cream like potatoes. Parsnips can be cut into chunks and added to soups or stews or baked in the oven with meat stock and butter. Roast parsnips with beef, pork or chicken. Parsnips can be…
Root Vegetables
Carrots: Kitchen Basics
Tiny carrots steamed whole in butter; young carrots glazed in honey syrup; half-grown carrots served fresh from the garden: carrots need not be taken for granted. Long an ingredient in stocks, soups, and stews or combined with other vegetables, carrots can stand alone as a flavorful treat. The key to serving the best, tasty carrots…
Beets: Kitchen Basics
Beets have a sweet, earthy taste. If you bake or roast them in their skins, you can enjoy that flavor at its most intense. Cook beets only until they just lose their rawness then combine them with meat, fish, grains, fruits, nuts, celeriac, fennel, or bitter greens. Once tender, beets can be sliced or diced…
Parsley Root: Kitchen Basics
Parsley root is a carrot-shaped, beige-white root whose flavor is somewhere between celeriac and carrot with hints of celery, turnip, and parsley leaf. This winter and early spring vegetable can be steamed, boiled, puréed, or creamed. Use parsley root in braises, soups, stews, and vegetable mixes to add depth and aroma. It works particularly well…
Celeriac: Kitchen Basics
Celeriac combines the sweet taste of the mildest celery with the light peppery zip of parsley. Celeriac—which is also known as celery root, celery knobs, and turnip-rooted celery—can be used as a substitute for potatoes, but you can easily learn to like it for itself. Celery root rémoulade is a standard first course or hors…
Rutabaga: Kitchen Basics
Rutabaga is tasty served mashed with butter, cream, and spices. Sauté rutabaga in butter with apples and brown sugar, or dice and add rutabaga to vegetable soups and stews. The rutabaga can be treated like a turnip in the kitchen—boiled, steamed, mashed, roasted, baked, and fried. When it’s served it will taste just a bit…
Turnips: Kitchen Basics
Turnips braised in butter, parslied turnips, turnip and potato purée, glazed turnips, turnip casserole: these are just a few of the ways that the “French Chef” Julia Child suggested one might enjoy turnips. Small young turnips are delicate and slightly sweet; larger more mature turnips can have the crisp flavor of an apple or offer…
Radish: Kitchen Basics
Radishes can be small and round, large and round, oval, oblong, and long. A cherry radish can be about ½ inch (13 mm) in diameter—about the size of a cherry, and the carrot-like giant daikon can grow to 1½ feet (45 cm) in length. Radishes can be red, white, red and white, pink, purple, green,…
Daikon: Kitchen Basics
Daikon is a long white radish sweet-mild to peppery in flavor and juicy crisp. Once found only in Asian markets, daikon is now common at farm markets and is most flavorful in the fall and winter. Daikon–which means “long root” in Japanese–is most commonly eaten raw or stir-fried. It is a staple in nearly all…
Salsify: Kitchen Basics
Some say salsify has the subtle, sweet flavor of an oyster. Some say salsify has the flavor of asparagus or artichokes. Others say no. Two things are for sure: salsify is sometimes called “oyster plant”, and salsify can be cooked in many of the same ways as asparagus or artichokes. It can be baked, boiled,…
