Celery Root Magic

Tasty soup from a celery root

We love cooking with the seasons. It lets us have a huge variety of food during the year and feel good about indulging ourselves intensely during brief veggie seasons (Ah those ramps! Ah those peas! Ah those tomatoes!).

In Wisconsin, the late fall and early winter vegetables last quite a bit longer. These are the keepers - the long storage vegetables that sustain us into January and, for a few, into February: cabbages, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, onions, beets, onions, garlic. The darkest days of winter are filled with these intensely earthy and intensely sustaining vegetables. I love them for their taste and I love them because they are so abundant locally.

The newest at our table, thanks to our CSA farmers, is celery root or celeriac. It is often a huge and ungainly looking beast of a root. But that flavor! It has a bright and spring-like celery taste that can substitute for celery in recipes or, better yet, shine out on its own. Peeling off the thick skin reveals a creamy, crunchy interior that begs you to make a soup or puree.

Here is one tasty way we have made this root.

Celery Root Soup
 - from Faye Levy's International Vegetable Cookbook (Warner Books, 1993)

This eastern European soup can be adjusted to reflect the weight of your celery root!

3/4# celery root, peeled, quartered and sliced 1/8" thick
3/4# boiling potatoes, peeled, quartered and sliced  14" thick
1 T oil or butter
1 medium onion chopped
2 c. chicken stock or 2 cups water w/ veggie bouillon
Salt and pepper to taste
1.5 c. milk (whole or 2%)

Saute the onion in fat over medium low heat until soft.  Add liquid and celery root, bring to a boil, cover and cook five minutes. Add potatoes and seasoning to taste. Cover and cook 25 minutes or until veggies are soft. Puree with an immersion blender. Add the milk off the heat. To reheat, microwave. Serve with crusty warm bread or a lefse round or two.

Makes 4 cups of soup.

P.S. If you want to add some additional substance, add some cooked wild rice and sauteed leeks to the soup. Heavenly!

Solstice Lefse Madness

Holiday baking and cooking traditions are often ones that are specific to cultures and ethnic groups. Growing up in Green Bay, we had alot of Belgian, German, Polish foods that showed up around the Christmas holidays that we learned to make. When I joined my husband's family, Swiss delicacies were introduced. Other traditions have been shared by and learned from friends.

The equipment - borrowed from Lloyd's mom

Our newest foray into foods from another tradition is lefse. I am a huge potato fan and so lefse has long called my name. This Norwegian flatbread is most easily made with specialized equipment (a grooved rolling pin, flat griddle and turning stick) - none of which we actually owned. Although we had made this delicacy once or twice with Lloyd's family, it has been decades since we did this. We often promised ourselves we would give it a try.

the results

A local community education class this fall got us going. Two Norwegian-American sisters took 17 of us eager lefse-makers-to-be under their wing. The sisters had peeled, boiled, riced and incorporated cream and butter into the potatoes the night before. We added flour by the cupful and used our hands to fold it in until we achieved a firm, non-sticky consistency. During the rest of the class, we all had plenty of opportunities to hone our rolling and griddling skills. And each of us proudly took home the results - twelve soft, goldeny rounds that last a week in the fridge or can be frozen. They are eaten plain, with butter, with sugar and in place of tortillas. Oh and the family recipe. I mean, really, what's not to love?

Madison lefse crew

When my friend Lynne saw our Facebooked class excitement, she extended an invite to join a band of friends and family who have long gathered (decades!) annually in Madison to crank out a leviathan's share of lefse. 40# of potatoes, four griddles, three rolling stations, one lesfe-ball-maker and seven makers worked five hours to crank out 194 lefse rounds.

Lynne mixing the lefse dough

It was mad fun! Flour everywhere, who could roll the thinnest round, disasters at the rolling station (if there isn't enough flour, that dough loves to stick and rip as you lift it off;  a cloth up in flames but quickly doused), strategizing how to improve the process next year (another annual tradition) and stowing lefse rounds under card table-sized cloths after baking to keep them soft. Much laughter and talk. Oh and moo shu pork lefses for lunch!

Working with this crew helped me feel confident about our own solstice lefse making planned the next day with Lloyd and me. We made 5# of potatoes and got about 50 smallish rounds. Enough to share with our families and set a few aside for our own lefse love. We think next year we should use two griddles.

I think we have another annual holiday tradition!

Late Fall Eating

We all enjoy the robust summer growing season that brings us a ton of fresh fruits and veggies throughout May-October. It's simple to make meals with the bounty.

Late fall and into winter are more challenging. But in many ways we find the food more interesting.

Many years ago, Steve Keune, offered a year round CSA. Lloyd and I thought it was the perfect time to challenge ourselves to eat with the seasons as much as possible. We had to be uber inventive as the winter closed in with all the root and "keeper" veggies. They took a starring role in our cooking.

We discovered it was easier than we expected to enjoy the vegetables we had available in late fall and early winter. And we got a little hooked on those humble roots in our eating. We have found ourselves in fall or winter CSA's ever since.

Harmony Valley CSA will be providing veggies through January for us this year. Squash, rutabagas, potatoes, onions, beets, brussel sprouts, cabbage, turnips, celeriac, carrots, parsnips, winter radish, sweet potatoes - these all become the stars of braises, stews, mashes, veggie roasts, soups and salads. We buy salad greens at the co-op. This year we are thinking about making sprouts to keep fresh healthy greens at our fingertips too.

Let me share a favorite recipe that lets rutabagas shine out. It's inspired by a recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone : Turnip or Rutabaga Puree with Leeks

Rutabaga/Potato Mash

• 2 small buttery potatoes (russet,  yukon gold, kennebac, yellow finn), peeled & chopped
• 1 medium rutabaga, peeled and chopped to about half the size of the potato chunks
• 1 medium leek, white parts only chopped
• splash of buttermilk 
• 1-2 T butter, depending on your taste
• S & P

Add water to cover veggies, some salt and simmer, partially covered 15-20 minutes or until tender. Drain the liquid. Mash the veggies with butter and buttermilk until smooth. Eat 'em up!

Cold weather coming? We are ready!

Making and Transforming Food

Our Ridgeland Harvest CSA has begun for the season - we're in our fourth of twenty weeks of the bounty of Wisconsin veggies. After fifteen years in CSAs, we know what each week is likely to bring and are delighted at the challenge of the unexpected veggie.   This Fourth of July weekend was particularly fun because it contained three days to make after being gone to a conference for the entire previous week. I missed cooking!

In the box we had rhubarb, green onions, 2# of peas, 1# of lettuce, napa cabbage, swiss chard, cilantro, broccoli, garlic scapes and a fennel bulb. What could be better? It's fun to spend 3-4 hours on each of these three long weekend days making and transforming these goodies into food for today, tomorrow...and the months ahead!

We started with rhubarb/strawberry fruit crisps. We make them in little coffee cups - a perfect bite and easy to share with friends and family.

Next, time to make garlic scape pesto. While reading the Fresh Food Nation: Simple Seasonal Recipes from America's Farmers,  the author MArtha Holmberg suggested lightly sauteeing the scapes first to soften them - and their sharp flavor. Oh baby, that pesto is to die for. It is frozen and ready for a winter's night pasta when we miss the sun and warmth of summer so much we could cry.

Then we must deal with those sweet plump peas. For us, it is Risi e Bisi or nothing. Our recipe comes from Saveur magazine and we use up those lovely green onions as well.

Our first cilantro features heavily in burritos we make and freeze for lunches. We make rice and add minced cilantro and juice of a lime. Combine that with refried beans, green chiles, and taco meat made with plenty of chile powder, cumin and onions and we have a burrito factory. We have twenty fat little lunches all frozen and ready for the months ahead.

Napa cabbage is delicious in slaw that is lightly dressed with rice vinegar, a hint of honey and soy and a splash of sesame oil - add a few toasted peanuts or cashews and mmmmmmmmmm.

The broccoli gets a light steam and is dressed with the same rice vinegar, honey, soy sauce and sesame oil - we add toasted sesame seeds for a wonderful undertone.

The lettuce is part of sandwiches and salads. This is the one time of year, in an homage to a favorite sandwich of my childhood, that I buy braunschweiger (liver sausage) and pile lettuce high on it for a tasty treat on Lloyd's homemade wheat bread.

The chard and fennel will be part of a Vietnamese rice stir fry that we make and munch the few days following - sesame oil, soy sauce, a little sugar and finished with eggs. It's a great place to include any other veggies lurking from last week too.

When people ask me if getting a CSA is worth it, I always answer yes...as long as you love to make and cook as much as we do!

The Power of a Made Meal

For the past ten days, both Lloyd and I battled a seasonal flu that had us down low.  Low energy, low appetite, low brain, low motivation.  At the same time, our refrigerator was not staying cool  - we had to keep it closed as much as possible to maintain safe food temperature. So we were limited in food at hand while we had repair folks out twice over five days fixing the problem.

Canned soups became the food of necessity. And we got tired of them very quickly.  After five days, with a refrigerator fixed, I finally had enough energy that I could stop relying on a can opener.  We started eating the real food we love again.

We had purchased a small bundle of pork from our CSA and with our final delivery of potatoes and onions, our first home-cooked meal after a week was scalloped potatoes with ham. I used an old recipe from Betty Crocker, a carefully used mandolin, parts of a ham steak and plenty of potatoes and onions.

It was comfort food from both our childhoods - a welcome homecoming back to making our own food again. It seems like a small thing, but the moment I could summon the energy to make a meal of real food again made me feel immeasurably better.

For the past few days we have been able to make our own simple meals again - pancakes, lambburgers, cooked carrots, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, scotch broth, roasted fish, pasta with our own sauce. We feel the comfort of familiar flavors and believe in the healing that a meal made with our hands from scratch makes possible.

 

The Big Apple

October is always apple crisp making time for us. Although I aspire to be a pie maker, I must admit that is it the quick crisp that draws my knife and time.

My favorite apple variety to use is an old beauty called the Wolf River. You can't much find it in the western part of Wisconsin where we live, but head east along the Wolf River where it originated and still grows, and the apple is readily found at farm markets and a few orchards.

My mom used it on occasion and she said my Grandma Loch did too. We all three liked it for it's fine tartiness in baking. But I suspect we also love it because you don't need to peel many to make that pie or crisp. These babies are huge, running from a half pound up to a pound each. Just three will fill an apple crisp pan and one can fill a pie! Since peeling is my least favorite part of the process, I make sure to get over to my old stomping grounds on the east side of Wisconsin in October to pick up a bag for baking.

For my recipe, I go to an old Betty Crocker cookbook and use this for the topping:

• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 5 1/3 Tablespoons butter
• 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon.

I mix that up by hand and sprinkle about half over the cut apples in a greased 8x8x2 pan and pop it into a 375F oven for 15 minutes.  I take it out and sprinkle the remaining topping on* and bake for 15 more minutes or until the apples get melty good.

A little ice cream on it while it's still warm and our perfect fall dessert or snack is ready to go!

*I learned this little half-and-half topping trick from the June/July 2002 issue of Fine Cooking Magazine. It keeps the topping from getting dark before your apples are done the way you want!

No Escaping Scapes

We've been growing garlic for quite a few years now. We break apart the garlic into cloves and bury it closely together about an inch deep in fall.

It's a favorite because it's a winter sleeper - it goes into the ground in October with a nice foot-thick mulch and we forget about it until it's leaves poke up. We always enjoy a little mild spring garlic in April and May when our stored garlic from the previous season's harvest has given it's last gasp.  But we like to wait for most of the crop to mature.

In June (usually right around the solstice) on it's way to maturity, the garlic puts out it's flower.  The lovely "scape" curls around with a hooded flower at it's end. If we left the scape on the plant, it would draw power from the growing garlic. Gardeners just snip off this scape to keep the energy directed to the growing garlic bulb.

But oh those scapes!  They can be refrigerated and then added to foods just like a clove of garlic.   Although we use a few like that, we go crazy for garlic scape pesto. We make it and freeze it for cold winter meals where, combined with pasta and veggies, it brings a warm remembrance of solstice and summer when we looked for it's distinctive curl.

The recipe below was shared by Cate and Mat, our CSA from Ridgeland Harvest*

Garlic Scape and Almond Pesto

• 10 garlic scapes, finely chopped
• 1/2-1/2 c. finely grated parmesan (or to texture/taste)
• 1/3 cup slivered almonds (toasted lightly if you'd like)
• 1/2 c. olive oil
• sea salt

Put about 1/3 of the scapes and almonds in a blender or food processor with some of the olive oil and mix. Continue to add these until these three ingredients are blended. Scoop into a bowl and add the sea salt and cheese.

If you don't use it immediately, press a piece of plastic against the surface to keep it from oxidizing. It can be stored for a couple of days or frozen for a couple of months (though we've been known to discover a tasty frozen chunk the next spring!)

*This year we got the sad news that their garlic crop hadn't made it.  Difficulty in obtaining the winter mulch and an over-wet spring has taken it's toll. We know how much their garlic harvest means to the farm's livelihood.  So we thank them for their efforts when the weather brings drought one year and too-frequent and too-heavy rains the next.

Mmmmmm Morels

Hunting for morel mushrooms is a time-honored forager's pleasure.  Wet woods and rain followed by hot temps usually bring these tasty fungi up and out. Lately, weather patterns have been disrupted and so the predictability in the appearance of these early May treats is hard to pin down. 

One is simply forced to head out to the woods and enjoy the spring flora and fauna day after day...how we suffer.

Our old hunting grounds of ten and twenty years ago are pretty well consumed by the spread of garlic mustard. So we have tramped alot over the past few years looking for just the right new spot. When we don't find morels, a kind neighbor shares or, if worse comes to worst, a stop at farmer's market to buy a few at a dear price is still fine with us. We crave the season's fruits and fungi!  This year, we supported a local farm family who found bushels of morels and paid the price for some amazingly big yellow beauties.

We usually get enough to put in some scrambled eggs or to saute lightly and put on toast.  Rarely, we still have some hoarded ramps and then we make our absolute favorite spring treat - ramp and morel pizza!

We saute the morels and ramps lightly. If we're lucky, we still have a chunk of garlic scape pesto (those lovely curlique greens that grow on your garlic as it strives to flower) saved in the freezer to spread over the pizza dough to create the foundation for the pizza. 

Garlic Scape and Almond Pesto
Blend together into a fine pesto paste.

• 10 garlic scapes, chopped fine
• 1/3-1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/3 cup slivered almonds, lightly toasted if you like
• sea salt to taste
• up to 1/2 cup olive oil

We add goat cheese and mozzarella, perhaps some slices of roasted fresh asparagus, a little Italian sausage on Lloyd's homemade dough and pop it on the grill.  The tastes are unique and sublime. Spring is encompassed!

And if we don't happen upon more morels this year in our hunt, we'll be back tramping again next spring. The woods invite us to enjoy them no matter what the result of our quest (I will say we found one lone stalk of tasty wild asparagus on our latest morel tramp so all is not lost in the tasty treats department). And that makes it all the more special!

Singing Sorrel's Praises

In the spinach family, sorrel has a tangy bite and pokes its head up early to greet the spring. Tender leaves are great in salads or added fresh to yogurt to make a sauce.  When they are cooked down, they turn a less lovely shade of green, but their tart taste stays true.

I've planted it in the garden and am happy to see it in spring (hint: I plant this perennial in the ground in a pot to keep it's spreading ways under control). We love to add it to our first greens - watercress and spinach - when we make our spring salads.  It is delicate and doesn't keep well so with my own plant,  I just pick what I need when I need it.

We recently came across a beautiful soup recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetable Literacy. She breaks out vegetables into their larger families (mint, carrot, knotweed, thistle, cucurbit, lily, sunflower, morning glory, legume, grass, goosefoot, nightshade and cabbage) and then talks about how to use foods within the same family. Like all her cookbooks, it is a rich and wonderful source of information and savory recipes that is a delight to read for research and for finding good foods to make.

 Ramped Up Spinach Soup with Lovage and Sorrel
(translated into Marge-ese)

2 c. chopped ramps (about 3 oz)
big handful of sorrel leaves (about 2 oz)
8 ounces of spinach leaves, w/o stems
2 T butter or delicate olive oil
3 c. ramp broth, water or light chicken stock
2 lovage leaves (we didn't have that and skipped this)
freshly ground black pepper
heavy cream or thick yogurt (optional)
toasted bread crums

Melt the butter over medium heat. Add the ramps and cook for 2 minutes. Add sorrel, spinach and 1 t. salt. Coat the veggies with the butter. Then add the broth, bring to a boil and simmer 10 minutes. At this point, if you have it, add the lovage.  Cool slightly and puree in blender. Gently re-heat and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with a smidgen of cream or yogurt swirled in. Add a few pinces of breadcrumbs if you want.

Simple and delicious as a spring rain!

Ramping Up for Ramps

And the spring food continues!  We are late this year for ramps - the wild leeks that grow in swaths in just the right spot. They usually spring up in late April and then literally fade away soon after. While we do some foraging, all our tramping this spring never revealed a good spot for these oniony short-lived treats. We don't worry about it though. Our friends at Harmony Valley Farms sustainably harvest these alliums and sell them at farmer's markets and the Viroqua Food Coop.

We always try to get our hands on 5-10 bunches during the season and cook with abandon. Stir-fries, added to scrambled eggs, sauteed and added to soups and stews, made into a pesto, on pizza. Theses are all wonderful ways to use these roots.

We were first introduced to ramps through our CSA on the eastern side of the state. Our May shares often contained ramps that our farmer Steve brought over from this area. We fell instantly in love with them. We were the CSA pick-up point for our area and I always hoped that members would take one look at these and put them in the "Anybody can take these" box for unwanted veggies. I would even leave an oh-so-casual note, "If you don't want your ramps, we would be happy to have them". One friend, a cook of some reputation though unfamiliar with ramps, took that as a ringing endorsement for these treats...and I didn't get his share!

Locally a Ramp Festival has started (invitation only..and no, we aren't on the list) in a forest that boasts fields of ramps. Last night Lloyd and I met some friends at the Rooted Spoon Culinary for a spring ramps dinner featuring ramps dug Thursday from those fields. The menu was delightful and included:

• Chicken and ramp terrine
• Ramp pesto and goat cheese crostini
• Pickled ramps (to die for)
• Pea shoot salad with ramp dressing
• Trout stuffed with ramps
• Couscous with wild mushrooms, carmelized ramps and watercress
• Maple creme brulee

We wondered if we would be overwhelmed but our chefs knew how to weave the strong flavors throughout the meals in a way that had us savoring the offerings.

The fleeting season of ramps is almost over but we feel like we honored it well. And there are still two more bunches in the fridge to play with!

Watercress Time

The coulee region of Wisconsin is full of bluffs, hills and valleys. Spring-fed streams are everywhere and in many of these streams grow the peppery, piquant watercress. The variety in these streams tastes nothing like the bland product sometimes available in grocery stores.

Cress can be available during fairly cool months if the stream is running and not frozen over. March and April often bring an abundance of this green. Family lore has it that only in months with an "r" in them can it be gathered. In the other months, water bugs find this leaf just as tasty as we do and cleaning becomes a chore as well as a lesson in aquatic zoology.

I've been lucky enough to enjoy it for years from the stream that runs through the farm that is still in the hands of Lloyd's relatives. Sometimes our food co-op has some, sometimes the early farmer's market. We look forward to eating it in spring with a roaring anticipation. The first greens of the season speak to us of the bounty ahead. A quick spread of mayo on Lloyd's homemade wheat bread piled high with the fresh cress makes a sandwich that tells us that spring has really arrived.

And So It Begins...

Today, I went to the garden and dug my first garlic of the season.  I love nothing better than pulling these first delicate slips. It means spring really is here and the growing season is upon us.

Last fall, I buried many individual cloves and covered them heavily with straw. Since then, these  little beauties have been sleeping away the winter.  The first hint of light and warmth brings their shoots up above the ground.

When I dig them, the clove is wet and withered. I peel off that layer, and inside there is a thin shoot, looking much like scallion.

This first garlic is sweet and mild enough to put raw in salads.  Tonight, we're making Miniera, a Brazilian dish that marries thinly sliced collard greens with bacon (yes, greens and bacon - a match made in heaven). A few slices of this sprightly spring garlic serves as a perfect mild flavor maid of honor.

Collard Greens Miniera

1/2 # collard greens, halved lengthwise and stems and center ribs discarded
2 slices of bacon, finely chopped

Stack the collard leaf halves and roill cross-wise into a cigar shape. Cut crosswise into very thin slices (1/8"). Cook bacon til crisp. Add collards, tossing to coat and cook until just bright green (about 1 minute. Season with salt and serve.

Gourmet Magazine January 2001

Ten Ways to Cut Your Grocery Bill While Eating Healthy

I like the common sense approach taken in this post from Food Tank, a "food think tank" webpage. These are all tips we have used to eat economically. Small things can make a difference...especially getting off the corporate food chain.

Image: 'the curse of eleven eleven'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/15732690@N00/3670097230
Found on flickrcc.net

Beets - A Loved Root Vegetable

Of all the root vegetables, my favorite for most of my life has been beets. From the piquant pickled beets of my childhood, to the robust sauteed beet greens and the delicate sweetness of lightly cooked baby beets of my adulthood, beets have held me in their thrall. It doesn't matter if they are the dark ruby ones or chiogga or golden beets. Each is tasty and each is carefully kept long after the season is over to be put into our meals for many winter days.

A favorite way to make beets is to turn them into bright little chips with any supper. Crank up the oven to 400F; cut the beets in 1/4" slices and spread them in a pan on parchment paper. Lightly oil and salt and pepper them. Bake for 10 minutes;  flip them and bake another 10 minutes. Slightly crisp, a little smoky and deeply sweet and roasted, they are finger-licking good.

Another favorite way to cook them is from an old recipe (so old I've lost the origin), Roasted Beets and French Lentil Salad.  Our friend Francoise (an amazing cook) would make the most astounding lentils with the simplest ingredients on New Year's Day. I think of her when I make this recipe because the tastiness of the lentils echoes hers in some small way. It always calls to me at the turn of each new year as well.

Beets finished roasting

• 3 medium beets, oiled, wrapped tightly in aluminum foil and roasted in a 400F oven for one hour; then peeled and diced
• 1/4 c. minced flat leaf parsley
• mixed baby salad greens
• 3 oz of goat cheese

Combine in a saucepan & cover by 2" with cold water:

• 1 cup French or green lentils
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 large cloves of garlic peeled and smashed
• 1/2 onion studded with whole clove
• 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt

Bring to a boil and simmer uncovered until lentils are tender (about 25 minutes). Strain lentils and discard herbs, garlic and onions.Put lentils in a large bowl.

For dressing:

• 1 1/2 T sherry wine or balsamic vinegar
• 1 T. whole grain mustard
• 1/2 t. salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 2 3/4 T olive oil
• 1 shallot minced

Mix a little more than half the dressing into the lentils, add the diced beets and parsley and mix.  Use the rest of the dressing on baby salad greens. Top the greens with the lentil mixture and add dots of goat cheese on top.

This makes enough for 4 main dish salads. Um, I'd show you a picture of the finished salad...but we ate it too quickly! Num!

Getting Fresh - Winter Salads

Pomegranates & shaved radishes

We love fresh greens in the dark days of winter. Although we enjoy eating local and seasonal, this is the hardest to achieve with salad greens during January and February. Most farms, even ones with greenhouses, can barely afford the fuel for heat and grow lights in this darkest of seasons to grow the delicate beauties. Few achieve it near us.  But we crave a fresh bite, so off to the co-op we go.

For some odd reason, we get more crazy inventive with our salads than we do in spring and early summer with abundant salad greens at our fingertips.  We top our winter salad greens with pomegranates and oranges; pears and citrus; avocados and nuts; shaved radishes and cabbage . We play with vinegars as we make our dressings and noodle around with bits of this and that for more crunch. Cheeses in little dollops for the soft ones and thin shaved pieces for the hard ones lend an interesting depth to the proceedings.

It's like a little party everyday. We're not sure what'll appear in our salads but that makes it all the more fun!

Winter Farmer's Market

It's been over six weeks since our last winter delivery from Ridgeland Harvest, our CSA. We have a some carrots, beets and turnips left; a smattering of onions, one last bag of potatoes and beautiful garlic. The radishes and squash are long since eaten.  But more winter vegetables are still plentiful for us because of winter farmer's markets that linger into February.

What kind of food can you possibly find in the dark, cold days of mid-winter? Cabbage and onions, meats and eggs, root vegetables - and best of all - greens are still coming our way. We went down to Madison's market on Saturday and found sweet microgreens and frost-touched spinach, more squash and onions, a great cabbage and more of our new addiction - beauty heart radishes.

There were also potatoes, onions, garlic, mushrooms, beets, rutabagas, delicate lettuce, sunflower oil and all the wonderful winter-keeping root vegetables that can sustain you and are marvelous in soups and stews.

Root vegetables like turnips and rutabagas have been a revelation to us over the last few years. The waxed roots at the stores were always a little disgusting. So never purchased, never eaten.  Now that we have access to these roots through our CSA and winter markets, we've embraced them and found their rich flavor and high vitamin content a welcome addition to our winter eating. I'll share a recipe or two over the coming weeks to motivate you - and hope you share your favorites with me!

Winter Cooking Wonder

Mississippi River slough on Goose Island, La Crosse WI

As the snow falls and the temperature plummets, we both find great comfort in the foods we cook in winter.  Stews and soups, an occasional bold run out to the grill (a Big Green Egg - a gift from my brother and mother); citrus and salad greens as we can. We have a fridge and pantry full of root vegetables - beets, rutabagas, carrots, turnips, potatoes and some lovely fresh Beauty Heart and Black Spanish radishes that make our salads sing.

Our minds turn to meat quite often now - the lamb from our farmer Carol in Amherst; the pork roasts and tenderloins from an Argyle  farm family; tiny, tasty tenderloins from our farming friends in Ettrick and rural Clintonville; chickens from our CSA farm near Viroqua; the Mississippi flathead catfish from a local fishmonger - perhaps because the deep cold calls us to eat more protein to keep warm. It's all packed away in the freezer for us to make our way through during the long cold days.

There are long rituals of making these meals in the cold weather - not the fast stir fry or quick toss of vegetables of the spring and summer. This is the long simmering; the slow braising; the baking and the stewing to develop the deep complex flavors that pique our interest and palettes. We come back from a ski or a snowshoe or a shovel or a bracing, skating hike on the sidewalks and find the warmth of these slow meals cooked in the winter dark to be a wonder in themselves.