Mashed turnips

We found a Palestinian cookbook with a recipe for mashed turnips with greens, onions, and feta cheese. We added the bacon on general principles.

6 comments:

Texan99 said...

Garden turnips, of course.

Grim said...

“We added the bacon on general principles.”

Those principles entailing that this ‘Palestinian recipe’ be neither kosher nor halal! I suppose that’s a good Christian attitude.

Texan99 said...

They have some good ideas about food, and some questionable ones. I don't feel bound by the questionable ones. It's not as though the author would be joining us for dinner!

E Hines said...

Frankly, I'd rather feed the turnips, greens, and feta to the pig and eat them via the bacon.

There are a number of kosher and halal dishes that are delicious, but I'm not bound by any particular diet rules other than no fried liver, no boiled spinach, and no turnips will see the inside of my house.

Eric Hines

Gringo said...

Re bacon: there are Palestinian Christians, though apparently not as many in Palestine as there used to be. I knew a Palestinian Christian family from the 1960s: most of them STEM graduate degree level. Those I knew are now dead, with the exception of one who returned to the West Bank. Before the Six Day War in 1967, the patriarch of the family advised his children to leave the West Bank. Reason: from his experience as a civil servant under the Jordanians, he concluded that Muslims will always promote a Muslim over a Christian.

Texan99 said...

We finished off the mashed turnips and are having turnip soup for dinner, along with boiled endive with some garlic and a little balsamic vinegar. I was terribly skeptical of the balsamic, but it's a small amount that doesn't impart any noticeable sweetness. Really delicious, but then I'm a greens fanatic and have been since childhood. It was a relief to find that the endive cooks up well, because I wasn't enjoying it for raw salad: too tough and bitter. There's plenty of other good lettuce in the garden.

The mashed turnip dish was actually slightly disappointing in taste. When I finished it off for lunch today it was much improved by a bit of heavy cream and the drippings from some heated-up andouille sausage.

The third dish tonight is a terrific Israeli salad of mango, cucumber, and red onion. We can't get enough of it.

The greens season will be over soon. In a few weeks it will be frankly warm, and the caterpillars will start munching the leaves in earnest. I managed to unload a lot of greens on a neighbor yesterday, but we barely made a dent in the garden.