KITCHEN ADVENTURES: LIKE A GOOD PENNY! Today I cooked with turnips for the first time, for a warm salad. I can confidently say that this vegetable will be making many repeat appearances in my kitchen. Turnips are just as creamy and blank-slate as all the best comfort food.

So here’s what I did: I heated the oven to 400. I chopped up some cute turnips with a Japanese-sounding name I can’t remember, into big chunks. Imagine approximately a smallish button mushroom: That’s how big they were. I then placed the turnip chunks on aluminum foil, drizzled seriously with light olive oil, tossed with cumin and a bit of curry powder, wrapped the turnip in foil, and stuck that in the oven. I waited about ten minutes.

(While I was waiting, I made a quick dressing by whisking ex-vir olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and some marinating liquid from a jar of water-packed artichokes, with a bit of salt and pepper.)

I chopped the turnip greens, chopped up a small hot pepper, and put that on to saute with ex-vir olive oil and salt and pepper.

I cut up a ciabatta roll into smallish pieces, and put it in the toaster oven for medium-well.

I chopped up some mozzarella.

At this point the toaster oven chimed. I let the ciabatta cool off. Once the turnip had roasted for about 20 minutes, I shredded the toasted roll, combined all the ingredients, drizzled with the dressing, and gave it another grind of black and white pepper. Then…

Then!!!

This was great. The balance of the salad wasn’t exactly right–it could use another bright vegetable, not necessarily an out-of-season tomato but maybe I could get another pepper up in there, and I had a bit too much mozzarella proportional to the other ingredients. But the caramelized creaminess of the turnip, combined with the dark rich cumin, was just perfect. I think I could just eat roast turnip with salt, pepper, and cumin, and feel like I was eating macaroni and cheese.

The greens were also delicious. Raw, they were much sharper but also much tastier than raw spinach, which has always struck me as kind of like eating dogwood leaves; cooked, they grew dark and rich, ready to play off of the hot pepper. Raw turnip greens reminded me a bit of raw sorrel (yum), while cooked turnip greens were more spinach-like, darker, more distinctive than cooked sorrel.

I just liked this so much. Which is good, since I don’t have a lot of winter vegetables I really love–even butternut squash, which of course is delicious when someone else cooks it, I’ve never quite been able to master.