Like many people, my spouse and I have been rotating through various pandemic hobbies…
Mind you, we’ve both been working full-time and dealing with pandemic exhaustion and a certain natural tendency towards inertia, so our hobby attempts have been pretty minimal. (Wordle is good for that.) No new side hustles or DIY remodelling here…though we did get this done:
Now? It’s on to vegetables.
See, cooking is something we do together, to decompress after work (or at lunchtime, while we’re lucky enough to both be working from home), to get out of our heads and away from our screens/keyboards, to spend time together, to do something hands-on and also delicious.
And I’ve become passionate about eating local. A few months after the pandemic started, we signed up for a small grocery delivery service that partners with local farmers and other producers. (I first wrote about them here.) Between that and our vegetable garden, we’ve been doing a lot of seasonal eating. This winter we’ve eaten so many roasted carrots and parsnips and squash that, uh, one of us finally rebelled. To be honest, the other one (me) was getting bored of our go-to vegetables, too.
So I’ve started adding one new-to-us locally grown vegetable to every biweekly order. (Full disclosure: In the alternate weeks, we get delivery from one of the big chains and buy some non-local produce.)
It started with rutabaga/swede [the big yellow and purple root vegetable, not the smaller white and purple root vegetable–apparently there’s some overlap in the name depending on where you’re from (warning: Wikipedia link, beware the rabbit hole…)]. It was big and intimidating to look at, but not hard to cut through or prepare. We roasted it, on the theory that most vegetables are best roasted, or at least you can’t go wrong that way. Good choice–it was nutty and flavourful, not unlike parsnips, in fact.
Next I picked turnips, on the theory that if rutabaga wasn’t hard, turnips, being smaller, must be easier. Also a good choice! They went into beef stew first, which is never bad in winter. We roasted a few as well, and the last one we kept raw and cut into matchsticks along with some carrots for refrigerator pickles (another newish hobby). It made a lovely side dish for salmon fillets.
This weekend’s experiment was leeks. We’re big fans of the Allium family (onions, garlic, chives, green onion, garlic scapes, and shallots, which are also on the “to try” list) but we had only tried cooking with leeks once, which ended badly due to insufficient cleaning. (If you’re not familiar, let’s just say leeks hold a lot of soil.) This time I googled and followed the instructions carefully. With my clean leeks, I sautéed some bell pepper and mushrooms in a little butter, then added the veg to pasta tossed with olive oil, leftover salmon, and roasted garlic, and of course Parmesan on top. This was agreed to be absolutely delicious.
I think turnips will enter our regular rotation. They’re just about as versatile and easy as carrots, and we do eat a lot of refrigerator pickles (and vinaigrette-based coleslaws…basically the same thing). Rutabaga and leeks, less so, but now that we’ve tried them, I suspect they’ll show up again for further experiments.
So…that’s three for three, and we’re starting to climb out of our cooking rut. What should we add to our vegetable experimentation list? Preference goes to things that are non-intimidating and easy to prepare. After all, the pandemic isn’t quite over yet…
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