Back to the Roots

I believe in eating local foods. For me, that means really local, i.e., something out of the vegetable garden in my family's back yard. I more or less sympathize with the "local foods" movement, but mostly I just like the way our own home-grown food tastes. And besides, it's cheap.

During the summer, there are all kinds of nice fresh things to be had, since we grow a pretty big variety of stuff. What can't be eaten when it gets ripe, just because there's so much getting ripe all at the same time, gets processed for later consumption. I pickle, I can, I freeze. I would have made a good rural Nebraska housewife in 1952.

This time of year we're in a kind of transition mode. The first hard frost has killed off what little there was remaining of the hardier above-ground things like a little bit of celery and broccoli. But there are still a few fresh things to be had before we have to break out the items that were preserved in various ways: Root vegetables! In our case this means potatoes, carrots and parsnips (I'm not sure whether potatoes officially count as root vegetables but since they grow underground I'll consider them to be at least honorary root vegetables).

My kids do not like root vegetables. They don't like fish, either. But the rule is that our house is not a restaurant and we eat what's on the table. So last night for dinner we had fish with roasted carrots and parsnips, sending them through the entire Kübler-Ross cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

As the season progresses, and as we eat our way through the various items of our own that were processed during the summer, I'll head to the grocery store for things like turnips that we don't grow ourselves, and which even My Favorite Wife is a little suspicious of. My family always looks a little apprehensive when I announce that I will do the shopping for tonight's evening meal because God only knows what weird stuff I might bring home to foist upon them. My daughter would actually prefer that I completely refrain from cooking dinner because "you never make anything normal."

I suppose I do cook some things that most people consider a little out of the ordinary. But it's part of my decades-long crusade to save the forgotten vegetables. The forgotten vegetables are those items that you yourself have seen in the produce section but had no idea what to do with. I know you've walked past those rutabagas, the Rodney Dangerfield of vegetables, sitting there in the produce section and thought to yourself, "What are those ugly things? And what's with the weird name? Who in his right mind would eat such a thing?" And okra? Kohlrabi? Does anyone actually eat this stuff? I sure do. I grow some of it in our garden, too.
 

Consigned To Oblivion No More!

My forgotten vegetable crusade started when I was a college student shopping for my own food for the first time and began noticing this stuff at the local grocery store. There were lots of things I had never eaten, and that I couldn't recall ever seeing anyone else eat. Out of curiousity, I started bringing things home to see what could be done with them. College is traditionally the time for new vegetable experiences, right?

I am happy to see that I am less and less alone in my crusade. I did a Google search on "forgotten vegetables" and found that the term, which I thought I had invented, is in fairly widespread use to describe exactly the sort of thing I discussed above. (Try googling it yourself; I promise I'll wait right here while you do.) I guess I should have trademarked the expression when I started using it some 25+ years ago. Another opportunity missed!

Many of my friends and neighbors are getting introduced to the forgotten vegetables through community supported agriculture (CSA). In case you're not familiar with it, the idea behind CSA is that you buy a share of a small farm's produce, helping to guarantee the farmer's livelihood, and in exchange you get a mixed box of whatever is currently being harvested delivered to you direct from the farm every week. Typically it's organically or semi-organically produced food, so you get something that's good for you and at a good price to boot. The only caveat is that there is a good chance that at least sometimes your box is going to include an item that you've never seen in your leafy suburban life. Especially now, at the extreme tail end of the season, there's a good chance that you'll be getting a root vegetable that will leave you scratching your head about exactly what to do with it.

But tonight I'll be eating my own root vegetables again. Okay, potatoes, which we concluded might not be root vegetables per se, but we'll let them pretend that they are because they want to belong and self esteem is important. It is the season in which my tribe lights candles and consumes potato pancakes fried in oil in commemoration of the miraculous victory in the guerilla insurgency against the foreign invaders. I'll bet that makes those potatoes feel really special.