VEGANesp
So two things we’ve been getting a lot of in our CSA box are turnips and greens. Lots of greens. Lots and lots of greens. And turnips. Until three weeks ago, I’d never even eaten a turnip and now I’m spending an alarming amount of time finding creative ways to use them. This week in CSA Adventures (also known as What The Hell Do I Do With Eight Million Turnips?) brought me to this recipe for Potato-Turnip Patties, which I veganized by leaving out the egg and replacing it with a bit of potato starch. Worked like a charm. These reminded me more than a little of the potato pancakes my mom made when I was growing up. Her parents emigrated from Belarus, so Eastern-European cuisine was a big part of my childhood. Of course, this also meant that sour cream went on everything that held still long enough. We put it on potato pancakes (a version of latkes, but not exactly the same), blintzes, in cookies (yes, there’s an old family recipe that uses it in the dough). Thankfully, now as a vegan, I have found the wonder that is the cashew. Seth got me a shiny red Vitamix for my birthday (yes! I am that lucky!) so I have been exploring making cream sauces and whatnot from cashews as opposed to silken tofu. (Although this recipe for tzatziki is amazing and will be a regular around here. I gave it to an ovo-lacto vegetarian and a bunch of omnis and they loved it.)
Anyway, I couldn’t serve any potato pancakes like item without some kind of sour cream or creamy sauce for them, and I also felt like horseradish would go well with the potato-turnip version. The patties/cakes had a fair amount of green onion (or scallions of you can find them) in the batter, so you ended up with a slightly sweet (from the turnips), slightly onion-y, and very potato-y little cake of yumminess. So, horseradish cream sounded perfect. I started out planning to make a half batch, but at the last minute decided to go for a full batch. I sort of whished I’d done the half, since the recipe made a lot and now I don’t know what to do with it all. The prepared horseradish I had in the fridge wasn’t as strong as I think it needed to be. The recipe asked for 2 teaspoons and I put in 3 and it still wasn’t as prominent as I expected it to be. Seth thought it was a bit bland. I also made a batch of collards, which I tried really hard to like. There have been so many greens in the CSA box, I’ve had to get creative with ways to use them all (smoothie anyone?). This week, in addition to chard (yay!) we got a big bunch of collards. Seth was all but turning cartwheels when he saw them – he loves collards. I was glad to see them too because a) they make him happy and b) I know what to do with them. Plus, they would help use up some of the turnips, since he likes those in his collards. So I chopped up the collards and the turnip greens, an onion and several cloves of garlic. After sautéing the onion & garlic for a few minutes, I added the greens/collards and about two cups of vegetable broth, covered the pot and let it go. I cut the turnips into smaller pieces since they were pretty big and then added them to the pot as well, reduced the heat to a simmer and left it alone for about an hour- adding salt at some point because I forgot. Seth said it turned out really good, except for one thing – we had two kinds of turnips: red and white. The red ones didn’t cook as well and remained a bit tough. I added some balsamic vinegar to my bowl and it made the collards more edible, but I still just don’t like them. Except for the tough red turnips, Seth said his was so good he didn’t even want to add any vinegar. So, score for Seth on the CSA collards.
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