TONS of Rutabaga, ideas?

I have five huge rutabags given to me from my father's garden. I see many recipes for roasted root vegetables, but I don't have a taste for that.

I may try to make a pasty but what else can I do with this cro-magnon vegetable? HELP!

You might prefer the rutabagas mashed. Added to mashed potatoes, they are great. This month's Cooks has an article on how to combine other root vegetables with potatoes successfully. Or you might pair them with a strong-flavored meat like lamb in a braise, as they do at Ed's Potsticker House. That is one of my top ten winter dishes in Chicago.

You can just peel and slice them and eat them raw as a crudite.

Jazzfood wrote:You can just peel and slice them and eat them raw as a crudite.

I really like raw rutabagas. They have a mild natural sweetness like Jicama. They also make a very nice slaw when shredded with carrots and dressed.

Rutabagas are AKA swedes. Here is a link to a post Antonious wrote about rutabagas entitled "I love Swedes"

Josephine wrote:You might prefer the rutabagas mashed. Added to mashed potatoes, they are great.

They are! Some enticing pictures too, in this post.

As Josephine says - a mixed mash of taters and neeps, a hearty stew, say beer braised short ribs... look out Winter, here I come!

You can slice 'em paper-thin and deep-fry them to make chips.

Best,
Michael

Of course five rutabagas will last a long time if you don't want to eat them all at once. I'm a fan of them roasted, mashed, in soups and stews, but I also saw a recipe recently for a rutabaga slaw that looked interesting and makes sense, since if anything, the rutabaga's flavor is milder than a cabbage.

And for something completely different, here's a rutabaga custard pie.

Hi,

I have notice the store-bought rutabagas are all wax coated. If you are keeping them for any length of time, you may want to investigate why they are wax covered. Of course, please let us know!

Regards,

Josephine wrote:You might prefer the rutabagas mashed. Added to mashed potatoes, they are great. This month's Cooks has an article on how to combine other root vegetables with potatoes successfully.

I made that root veggie mash last week (but with celeriac) and will vouch for that recipe. I, too, felt like something in the flavor of a boiled root vegetable/potato mash was off; this recipe solves that problem.

Just recently decided to make my own Cornish Pastie - an excellent way to use up rutabagas as you can freeze and reheat cooked pasties. I'd been planning to post about it but time got away from me - I did a fair amount of research on the internet and triangulated a recipe that should be staunchly historically accurate. I originally made them with my own piecrust, but I really think they would benefit from a tougher store-bought piecrust, since it's a handheld pastry. If you do that, this has got to be one of the simplest recipes ever:

Piecrust (you can use puff pastry as well)
Equal parts of:
Thinly sliced rutabaga,
thinly sliced potato,
thinly sliced onion,
skirt steak cut in pieces (some recipes suggest chuck - think fatty here.)
Salt and pepper to taste
(if freezing, add a dab of butter to filling and dust with flour to help the gravy)

Roll out pastry, use a dessert plate to cut into 8" circles - place veggies and raw meat in the center in alternating layers, adding salt & pepper as desired. Be careful not to overfill - keep the next step in mind: draw two sides of the circle up over the center and pinch to form a seam along the top and down two sides - your pasty is now a half-moon shape. Crimp the edge like an empanada (pinch, fold over, pinch, fold over, tuck under end) Put finished pasties on a baking sheet; you can use an egg or milk wash but I didn't and they were fine. Bake at 425 for 40-45 minutes.

The history of these meat pies is a lot of fun - it is said that the song "Oggy, oggy, oggy, oi, oi, oi" (which you may know as an Australian football cheer) was Cornish housewives yelling down the mineshaft that "oggies," or pasties were ready for lunch, and their husbands responding with the UK equivalent of "yea!" The oggies were then dropped down the shaft to their consumers. The crimped edge is especially important, as it offered Cornish tin miners a sanitary way to eat - it was "left for the pixies" along with the arsenic that probably stained their hands. Cornishmen claim that the oggy is the parent of as disparate savory pies as the empanada and calzone, but its closest cousin is available in Michigan - although the American version uses precooked ground beef.

These humble ingredients turned out to be an amazingly good combination - I think I'll thaw some out for lunch.