vegetable adventures, part 1

As I mentioned earlier, my family is participating in a CSA with a local farm, and so far it's been an interesting and delicious experience. The first week we got lots of fresh lettuce, some herbs, the greenest pea pods I've ever seen, and one pint of delicate, beautiful early strawberries, which I turned into a strawberry tart for Kathleen.

Since then we've gotten at least two pints of strawberries every week, and more lettuce. Beets, radishes, zucchini, sweet little pickling cucumbers, and fresh currants (both red and white) have all come through our kitchen. And then last week we got our first UVO - unidentified vegetable object. Spiky and maleficent looking, it wasn't really like anything I'd seen before. My mom stripped its green crown so it would fit in our crisper drawer, where it sat for several days before an illuminating newsletter arrived from the CSA with the weekly list of box contents. By process of elimination (not lettuce, not beets, not strawberries), I deduced that I was facing a kohlrabi.

I should have known to keep a weather eye out for this strange vegetable; a friend who'd participated in a CSA previously had warned me about them. "I didn't know what to do with it," she said, "so it just sat in our refrigerator all summer and eventually I threw it away." Being a child of the Internet generation, I turned to Google for answers. Wikipedia and the University of Minnesota website informed me that kohlrabi is part of the cabbage family, and can be eaten raw or served baked, roasted or steamed. Taking a cue from Deborah Madison's book Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which I checked out of the library and have been loving, I decided to steam it and serve it with sour cream and dill, potato-like.

Ten minutes and a sharp chef's knife transformed the kohlrabi from something alien to something ordinary, just a pile of small white matchsticks. My youngest sister, whose general disdain for all things vegetable has been observed in this blog before, wandered by and tried a few of the raw pieces. "This is good," she said, surprising both of us. "It tastes like cauliflower."

Which it does, vaguely, being clean and starchy with just a bit of a peppery finish. In a midstream change of tactics, and in deference to the fact that cauliflower is one of two vegetables Laura actually likes, we decided to roll with the kohlrabi's cauliflower-like properties and prepare it the way we like our cauliflower - tossed with a little bit of olive oil, kosher salted, and roasted in a 400 degree oven. Since the vegetable had already been cut into matchsticks, we ended up with a dish that resembled kohlrabi fries - salty, crispy, a little burned, and really not half bad. So our first vegetable adventure ended very well, and I'm looking forward to whatever next week's basket brings us.