Anyhow, I know I've been neglecting the cooking part of this blog so I finally dug up the cords to connect the camera...
A week and a half ago ... what I believe is the last snow of the winter here in Seattle. Lately it's been in the mid 50s (Wednesday is forecasted 62 degrees) so it's getting much warmer already. I survived! Seattle winters were very mild
Whole wheat penne pasta tossed with edamame, sun dried tomatoes, garlic, and preserved green shiso (from my garden earlier last autumn) tossed in grapeseed oil. Made for a wonderful lunch
So I'm always at restaurants where I see roasted root vegetables (often, in salad) on the menu. I thought to myself how I've never really grown up eating a lot of these "American" root vegetables like turnips, radishes, rutabaga, parsnips, etc. Also, since it's the winter, I see a lot of these now at the co-op market. In an effort to try to eat more seasonally (since it just makes sense), I tried my hand at roasting some root veggies for a fancy salad. My thoughts on various root vegetables:
Left to right, clockwise: parsnip (carrot looking root), golden beet, fennel bulb, and purple-white rutabaga.
Initial thoughts on the "smell" of each root after cutting ... parsnip smelled like a carrot, golden beet didn't really smell like anything distinct, fennel bulb of course is really licorice-y (but totally gone when roasted), and rutabaga smelled like cabbage.
Pattern inside the golden beet was so pretty
After roasting in olive oil and rosemary about 30-40 minutes - fennel is nice and cripsy, everything else is cooked through with a nice browning of the outside
Put all the root vegetables over some hand torn local lettuce (my fancy way of saying how I was too lazy to cut the leaves with a knife :-p), along with some honey tangerine and caesar dressing.
I've always loved roasted fennel. While it smells like really strong star anise or licorice when fresh, after roasting, it is so incredibly mild and even crispy if you get the slices thin enough. Technically I guess this isn't a root vegetable since it's the bulb of the plant that forms just above the soil line. The rest of the root vegetables softened to a sweet potato like texture: rutabaga still tasted like cabbage after roasting, parsnip turned out to have more of a potato texture than carrot, and golden beets were quite sweet. All in all it was good to try each of these prepared with nothing more than olive oil and the oven for roasting. While not my absolute favorite, they provide lots of nutrition in the winter time and were a tasty departure from what I'm used to. Maybe I'll try some different recipes in the future.
As I mentioned before, I'm reading "Night Train to Lisbon" and I can immediately say that this book is wonderful. It's about a Swiss professor of ancient languages who is stuck day in and day out in his life's routine, not noticing anything around him and not really "living" his life. One day he witnesses an enigmatic Portuguese woman who looks like she was about to jump off of a bridge after reading a letter and just the sound of the way she says her native tongue ("Português", pronounced poh-tu-geishh) perks his interest in the woman. At the same time, he comes across a book in a used bookstore of a mysterious doctor who wrote revolutionary works to assuage his guilt for what he believes was helping the dictatorship during the Salazar dictatorship in Portugual. The professor decides on a whim to take the night train to Lisbon to figure out who this man is, and to perhaps see the country of the strange, enigmatic woman. Along the way, you read of the professor's trepidations and hesitations since he's never done anything spontaneous or given into life's clues ... he could have turned around so many times along that long train ride from Bern, Switzerland to Lisbon, Portugal ... but somehow, circumstances and people along the way (not to mention his own self doubt about not being able to return to his old life in Bern) keep him interested enough to carry on. Whether it's him getting new glasses that might be too fashionable for him (but help him to see much more clearly without the burden of his old heavy glasses ... an obvious analogy to how one sees life), or his reading in Amandeu de Prado's mysterious publications who nobody seems to know about, the story is really engaging and I can identify with it a lot. Growing up in Ahwatukee for 20 years, even moving to downtown Phoenix seemed like a whole new world. Then came my first long-haul spontaneous roadtrip 2400 miles round trip to Austin, Texas, then a move to Hawaii, then a drive up the entire Pacific coast on the way here to Seattle, and now we'll be in the San Francisco Bay Area soon. While I might stay put for a while now, hopefully, (moving and packing gets old kinda quick) my experiences have really changed my life the way that "Mundus", the professor in the story, is quickly learning. I guess I identify with the professor's character easily because that was me just two years ago. Sometimes, however, one little experience (be it a roadtrip in my case, or an enigmatic Portuguese woman on the bridge and an old used book in this story) can be all one needs to see the world just a little differently and open oneself up to life.
I said goodbye to my fellow violinists at the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra last night when I gave Dan back his suit which I borrowed for the last concert. They seemed sad to see me go (Karissa my stand partner gave me a hug) and I was sad too ... they've been such a great group and I'm so happy to have been a part of it (even for just one concert). Getting back into playing the violin regularly in an orchestra ... I really missed that when I lived in Hawaii. I guess I'll have to audition for the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony once we get down in California.
And with that, I'll have to start on my homework! Week 2 of the new semester ... one of my online classes doesn't even have a syllabus quiz until the end of this week!
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