Cabbage, Radishes, Pearl

[mrissa]

Dear Great-Grandma,

I was in the store just after 6 this morning, beating the crowds to get my Thanksgiving supplies. The clerk said to me, “I can see you’re in charge of the vegetables this year. You have all the fancy things.” She was holding a cabbage and a bunch of radishes.

And I thought of you, Great-Grandma. I thought of you and your cousins

Comments

[sam_t]

Reaction 1:
Huh, I think of radishes as a summer vegetable. If cabbages are a fancy vegetable, what counts as not fancy? Mind you, I've always thought of savoy cabbages as quite impressive and stylish - it must take hours for tiny dressmakers to do all that quilting.

Reaction 2 doesn't really have words.

[mrissa]

You're right, I am probably lumping too many root veg together.

At least I wasn't buying parsnips and turnips and rutabagas. I tell you a story!

So my uncle Phil is a retired gentleman. In his 70s. He does the grocery shopping for himself and my aunt. Many people assume that this means he is widowed, because men of his generation do less of that sort of chore, but no, he's just awesome, has been doing the shopping for years. So he became gradually aware that there was a woman of about his age following him through the grocery store and smiling at him. Following...smiling.

Then he got to the produce department. Picked out parsnips, turnips, rutabagas. His follower looked him directly in the eye and said right out loud, "NAH--too WEIRD!" and turned and walked off.

[sam_t]

Oh, that's brilliant.

I had an enormous swede (rutabaga - at least, I think they're the same vegetable) in my veg box twice running, recently, and have discovered that they're great in a slow-cooked beef stew. I don't really like carrots in a stew so I mostly put it in out of desperation (I like swede and potato mash, but not all the time) but it turned out well: velvety but not mushy texture, and enough flavour to be its own thing but melding with rather than trying to outshine the beef. Sliced, fried in butter then braised in stock is also good, but that goes for a lot of things.

[genarti]

This made me tear up, just a little. Yes.