Rutabaga

It's a three day weekend!  Good thing too since it's been a long week.  Even though we've been having beautiful weather, there's just something about January that I find a little depressing.  Bold revelation, huh?  I think it's the dark evenings.  Anyway for this week's inspiration food I chose rutabaga.  How exciting, right!?  I don't remember ever eating rutabaga, or purchasing it, but it looks like this:

Yum, right?  Alright maybe not.  But it is a root vegetable and they usually hold the promise of being delicious; sweet potatoes, potatoes, beets, all wonderful.  So here we go.  I found a cookbook at the library that I was excited to try using.  It is called, "The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without," by, Mollie Katzen.  This is an author we have some experience reading because she has several great cookbooks for cooking with children called, "Pretend Soup," and "Salad People."

Inside this pretty inspiring book full of recipes I want to try I found one that sounded interesting and included rutabaga.  It's called, "Roasted Root Vegetables with Pear Glaze."  In addition to rutabaga it calls for parsnips, carrots, and sweet potatoes.  You can find the recipe here.  The downside of this dish is that it is time consuming; lots of vegetables to peel and chop.  But it was pretty good!  A little sweet (the glaze has both pear nectar and honey), but good, and a nice side dish to our entree (which was salmon...there was quite a bit of orange food on our table last night).  I didn't take a picture of the final product, but it looks pretty much like it did before it was cooked.  Obviously I do not have a future as a food writer.  Oh, and Jo would not eat this, but Tess did, because she thought it was all carrots and she "WUV's carrots."  Enjoy!