Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

You got the Rutabaga Blues? This reminds me of broccoli-bashing by you-know-who.

You're right about root vegetables with pasta. But in a soup they're wonderful.

among the rude things you learn when you move from Oakland to Minneapolis is that California's embarrassment of agricultural riches is not neccessarily shared freely with the rest of the country. you want 'seasonal vegetables' here this time of year, you pay up or go hungry.

it's a little thing, but I will never for the life of me get used to paying $5 a pound for a bell pepper even if it is twenty below outside.

Or perhaps we don't like these "seasonal" vegetables because our modern agriculture has rendered them virtually tasteless, as it is well on its way to doing with other vegetables. I've yet to taste anything grown in a greenhouse that was worth either my money or my effort chewing.

Maybe the problem here is restaurant/grocery store vs homegrown. Grow a few parsnips and turnips next winter in your backyard in soil well-amended with compost. Harvest, cut into cubes and boil along with the tops, and serve with a bit of butter. After a few years, when your soil has improved some, your roots will probably be good enough to eat raw.

Seconded, wcw. I found that out the hard way too.

D

Huh.

Bad mouthing parsnips. I can't imagine you've ever tried them. In the culinary hotbed that is Berkley, there is no roasted root vegetables? Or are you poor Californians stunted with what you would consider eating limited to carrots and an odd overpriced Fingerling potato? Perhaps you've never had something as wonderful as a cookie sheet full of roots (and I'm not so unkind to my nose up at any of them, turnips, rutabegas, parsnips, potatoes, yams carrots, etc.) roasted and carmelized to sweet perfection.

I'm a geographically disadvantaged Midewesterner who finds such things to quite a treat (but I suppose that follows given the position on the planet). Roasted roots in a spare cream sauce over pasta or perhaps with a light tomato sauce would be quite a treat, but I don't know if it is due to the restaurants inability to render a common comestible edible, or your sophisticated palate to deadened to such a simple joy as a this.

And don't even get me started on squash. You don't seem worthy of such a sublime delicacy...

Rutabagas are delicious. Sliced raw with a little salt, sweet and crunchy, Yum! You've just eaten too much iceberg lettuce and your tastebuds have withered and died.

I'm confused, you order pasta with seasonal vegetables, you get served pasta with the root vegetables that are in season just after the end of winter, and you complain? OK, I admit, pasta with root vegetables doesn't sound all that good, but it's still the case that not everything is in season all the time.

Even in California, out-of-season peaches are lousy. And how do you like the mangosteens, flown in from Thailand? Oh, you can't get mangosteens in the western hemisphere? In general, I'm much more upset by fruits & vegetables that are out of season and taste lousy, but are oh so pretty, on display in Whole Foods, than I am that I can't get decent peaches out of season.

Anyway, to make a general point, everyone who's ever received a Christmas present knows that the anticipation is better than the realization. Why do think you'd be better off in a world where peaches were in season year-round?

Also --

Newport is almost certainly different, but if I were in Providence or any of the other bastions of rust-belt Italian America I would stick with the classic dishes thereof. And in Amsterdam, NY, we didn't go to Russo's or Isabel's or the Mt. Carmel spaghetti supper in order to have pasta with seasonal vegetables.

Yam speaks the truth: roasted parsnips (and other root vegetables) are delicious. Mmmm, I should make a roasted vegetable salad tomorrow.

This midwesterner thirds ArC and Yam...

Bonus pasta dish, since Swiss Chard grows pretty much anywhere fairly well, often late into fall and into the early winter!

SWISS CHARD PASTA

ingredients:

-some penne pasta
-swiss chard
-breadcrumbs
-olive oil
-onions
-garlic
-(anchovies)

(proportions? Naaaaah! Just adjust the swiss chard: penne ration to your liking, have enough breadcrumbs to coat the pasta and swiss chard, and have enough olive oil to coat the breadcrumbs! Onions and garlic depend on your taste.)

1. Boil a kettle o' water, with some salt in it (y'know). Chop up the swiss chard into bite-sized pieces. Put the swiss chard and penne in simultaneously.

2. Put the olive oil in a frying pan, and fry the onions and garlic. Once you're midway through frying those, add the breadcrumbs (if you do it simultaneously, the onions and garlic are undercooked or the breadcrumbs overcooked). Try to make sure the breadcrumbs all have some olive oil on them. You can also add anchovies, I've heard. I don't eat 'em, but you can.

3. Once the pasta's cooked, drain it and put it on a platter. Pour the olive oil/breadcrumb/onion/garlic(/anchovies) mix over the pasta and swiss chard. Toss it sorta like a salad, mixing it in and together. The breadcrumbs stick to the swiss chard and penne.

Yeah, it's a vague recipe, but it occassionally works!

Nothing's wrong with root vegetables. Something's definitely wrong with pairing them with pasta in an ersatz "primavera". Boil or steam 'em, maybe mash them with butter, salt and pepper, and they can be reet lovely.

Brad, you say many sensible things, but this is not one of them. I suggest you go talk to Alice Waters on the subject of seasonal vegetables: after all, she must live just down the road from you. if you want to eat parsnip or rutabaga with pasta, then that is your problem, not a problem with root vegetables.

Chop up the root vegatables and fry them on a pan - then they are delicious. I wouldn't want to eat them with pasta though.

Kale!

What happened to Kale? I've never had that out of season. Braized with garlic, chicken broth, and with white beans, over pasta with a bit of grated cheese....

And parsnips are wonderful if prepared correctly.

Skip the pasta. Wrong time of the year. Think what you'll look like at swim time. Braise your root vegetables and don't be rude about them!

I'll take on the "large-scale irrigation projects" later, when I've cooled down.

In Rhode Island one must eat quahogs(and snail salad washed down with a cabinet .

Broccoli Rabe (rapini) par boiled then sauteed in olive oil and garlic on top of cavatappi/penne rigati is delicioso.

Don't knock cruciferous vegetables, green food and orange food. Of course legumes any time, i.e. ceccis/chicpeas.

No discussion of the appropriate wine with the root veg/pasta? Hi neighbor! Have a 'Gansett!.

Narragansett Beer is now made in Texas - it's in the stores, but rarely do you see anyone drinking it. Have a Newport Storm, if you like that kind of thing, or even better, a Joe Wold Cream Soda. Or Dell's. . .

The restaurant scene in Providence hardly fits the mold of "rust-belt Italian America" these days; thank god there's always Angelo's.

Snail salad is yummy if it's not too oily.

Heresy to speak ill of parsnips. Roasted parsnips + roasted pork = heaven.

Brad, if vegetables are made into a decent sauce you can use them on pasta. The "primavera" style of pasta with barely sauteed "fresh" vegetables should be banned to the dark basements of the Olive Garden marketing department.

It must be American quasi-religious thing, but listen: veggies have to be cooked, and hard, to have flavor. Fried eggplant, tomato sauce and mozzarella (Sicily; mozzarella is probably more of a Sorrento variation). Parboiled, then long simmered rapini (that broccoli rabe recipe is the only that sounded good to me, thanks; and that's Puglia). Soft, creamy beans or peas (from Naples to inland Veneto). Even potatoes, with barely a hint of tomato (Naples). Cheers

For those like myself who are of Northern European (Baltic Sea area) descent, turnips and rutabegas are a key answer to the question "What the hell DID my distant ancestors eat?" No wheat, no rice, no corn, no potatos, no citrus, no tomatoes, no sugar, no peanuts, no yams, no melons....

Chinese cuisine has two turnip-based delicacies, "lo-bo-gao" or turnip cake, and pickled turnip. Mmmm......

Trolling the turnip-lovers..... that's sinking pretty low.

There's an Erskine Caldwell story (Tobacco Road, I think) in which a man with a bag of turnips uses a couple of them to buy sex from a barely-teenage girl. Caldwell's "realism" was pretty exaggerated. I've always found that turnips are ineffective in that kind of situation.

lets not forget any of the named vegetables roasted and pureed. Add a little veg stock and cream and you have one of the world's best soups.

From a southern childhood:

Rutabagas stewed with saltpork and greens. Served sliced with the "pot likker" (the resulting broth), cornbread and plenty of pepper vinegar...

Another midwesterner voting with Yam et al.

Anyone else notice that Kevin Drum posted today about food? He admits to, well, you'll just have to read it yourself. It's too weird to repeat.

www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_04/003610.php

Californians!

Re: Scenes from the Attack of the Monster Wild Rutabagas! Rampaging Beets and lumber yards of 10 ft. Asparagus! It's all here: www.jenniferprince.com

Maybe there's something about New England that makes one not only like root vegetables and heirloom squashes but actually look forward to their appearance every fall. Admittedly early spring is a tough time culinarily here. But we do have off-season vegetables enabled by greenhouses and globalization, and 9 times out of 10 they have absolutely no flavor. I wouldn't want to have my hands tied by using/eating only seasonal produce (it's a long winter!), but I can't help but think that "vine-ripened" winter tomatoes and basil that's never seen the light of day are precisely the sort of thing that's wrong with our food - aesthetically speaking at least.

Excellent advice above, but if you go with rapini (or chicory or dandelion or escarole), make sure to add a few filets of anchovy (packed in salt, not oil), a bit of hot red pepper and serve with orrechiette. Please, no cheese. Squisito.

I was once in Lecce, in Puglia, in early March and had simply wonderful vegetable dishes: a puree of fava beans with chicory and crisp croutons, deeply caramelized onions with potatoes, pasta with acorn squash, braised fennel with tomatoe and herbs.... These will be my madeleines, I guess.

Oh Brad! I could've sworn you were more in tune with the Berkeley food pulse than that! Globalization?!?! Massive irrigation?!?!

No, no, no, no, NO! This is Heresy!

Greenhouses are OK as long as they are used properly. I mean, think about it. Seasonal vegetables in New England in late March? What can you grow when the ground is frozen? Nothing, you gather from the root cellar. Sheesh. What were you expecting? The word "seasonal" should mean something.

That said, I'm thinking you have to be a creative and skilled cook to create a root vegetable/squash pasta in March that tastes good. Not impossible, but you need to know what you're doing. Don't blame the vegetables.

While I agree with the pro-root vegetable folks here I mainly want to gripe about how California industrial agriculture has wrecked so many things.

I have to drive to Michigan for real peaches and pears (in season), I grow my own tomatoes and peppers so I can have real ones (in season), I shop the Chicago farmers markets for sweet corn (in season).

I can get all that stuff from the local store (in and out of season), but it's dull and tasteless and from California or, increasingly Chile.

I assure you, here in California it isn't tasteless. (The stuff we get is picked when it is ripe. The stuff you get is picked early and then shipped by train.)

When we feel like it, we pay for a jet-fresh Hawaii pineapple. It's worth it.

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