Many find the rutabaga to be an unapproachable food. I had nearly forgotten about the root vegetable Brassica napus (cousin to the Siberian kale, which we’ve been slipping in your stirfry mixes) until I traveled to the Finnish province of North Karelia (which borders Russia) two years ago and met some subsistence farmers who anchored their diet around this mysterious root vegetable they called “swedes.” It took me awhile to realize this term was the more popular synonym for rutabaga. Folks in the northern parts of the world grow them because they are incredibly hardly and can withstand the cold better than any other members of the Brassica genus. The growing season up there in Karelia was about three months, or less. We ate mostly what the farmers or the outlying forest grew: potatoes, peas, and mushrooms. But rutabaga was always the centerpiece. They cubed them and dehydrated them; they ground up their dried rutabaga leaves and made something that resembled kelp flakes. We ate the rehydrated cubes as breakfast porridge along with copious portions of forest berries.

Beyond porridge, just how else can they be used?

You can peel, boil and mash them with potatoes to get an extra robust flavor. Or, you might cook them as I – ever the vegetable pragmatist, seeking maximum nutritional impact for the minimum prep time – do: Slice the ‘bagas thin and add them along with a spicy pepper to an onion sauté; crank up the heat and lid the frying pan to sear them (just make sure you have enough oil) before adding your other greens (which require less cooking time). Finally, you can also root roast them. Chunk them up and briefly parboil them with beets; add to a glass baking dish along with some chunklets of winter squash, add olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary: roast at 375-400 degrees until soft and/or crisp on the outside.

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We’re starting the feel the impending winter here. We have carrots, parsnips and lettuce in the ground, and a few flats of broccoli in our greenhouse. We’ve begun bringing baby onions into the mix, and have little shoots of pea sprouts coming up. As soon as it makes sense to (temperature and day length), we’re going to direct sow more spinach (this is something that we must grow much more of) and the rest of the usual suspects (chards, kales, collards, radishes). We’re starting to plan out our spring season and would like to hear if there’s anything folks would like to have more of / less of, etc, please do not hesitate to let us know. While it’s hard to accommodate everyone’s tastes at once, hearing feedback allows us to discover patterns, which in turn informs what we plant.

-Quin