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A New Year. A New You! A New Food – Or Old?

By Allison St. Claire
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Even if a CSA membership or farmers market or real butcher is not readily available to you, head to that part of the grocery store you’ve been avoiding and pick something – anything –  that’s new to you and try it out.

y_allison13jan3ps_stclaire2It’s the time to implement healthy new year’s resolutions, especially when our minds and mouths have probably been overloaded with rich holiday goodies. I’d like to propose an easy, healthy experiment for the new year – try a new food a month! The foods you pick may be brand new to you: whoever even heard of celeriac nevertheless actually picked up one of those ugly, gnarled, grayish-brown balls of who-knows-what from the produce shelf? Or old: your grandmother used to serve beef tongue and you’ve never seen anyone eat it since... or if anyone does, it certainly isn’t going to be you.

My own biggest bugaboo for years was the green leafy section of the produce section. I grew up mostly eating cooked, home-canned vegetables. I’m sure we had fresh salads for a short period in the summers while visiting my grandparents who had gardens, but I don’t recall many leafy greens. Their vegetables were grown to preserve and eat during the long winter months. This was the northeast so, unlike what I imagine was bountiful in the south, fresh greens in the grocery and on our plates were pretty much limited to head lettuce and cabbage.

But as the greens aisle grew in abundance in grocery stores over the years, I still headed straight for the head lettuce. Kale? Collard greens? Turnip or beet greens? Yuck! I finally got brave enough to try different leaf lettuces and finally delicious, crunchy romaine. Wow – my taste buds were slowly realizing there was more to life than dull, almost nutrient-void, boring head lettuce. And my body enjoyed the energy from the increased vitamins and minerals they served up.

Ten years ago I joined a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm, and each week brought a wealth of new – and to me, unrecognizable – veggies, especially greens. Arugula, Belgian endive, frisee, Chinese cabbage, garlic greens, bok choy, tatsoi, chard, kale and all those other common leafy greens. And radicchio (ok, that’s red, but still counted as new to me.)

Even if a CSA membership or farmers market or real butcher is not readily available to you, head to that part of the grocery store you’ve been avoiding and pick something – anything – that’s new to you and try it out.

Oh, and tongue? I don’t think that delicious dish ever made it all the way down to the kids – grownups got the good stuff like that, as well as pickled pig’s feet and sweetbreads (thymus) and liver first. But I love tongue now that I tried it as part of my own pick-a-new-food-a-month experiment.

We’ll cover tongue and other economic meat cuts in another column. For now, let’s start with celeriac, which has twice the iron and five times the dietary fiber of a potato; 1 cup cooked has only 42 calories.

A new cookbook I heartily recommend is Roots: The Definitive Compendium, by Diane Morgan (Chronicle Books, 2012). Comprehensive it definitely is, covering history, varieties, nutrition, availability and selection, storage and recipes. As a wide-read foodie, there were still some items here I’d never heard of like crosne and malanga and scorzonera (salsify) – and that was before the “Other Roots” section tacked on at the end without specific recipes. And like “exotic” greens in my earlier years, I found that I have boringly confined myself to a handful of familiar roots like carrots, beets, ginger, potatoes, radishes and turnips for the most part. Almost everything in the book fills my goals – old traditional food but new to me.

My goal for the new year is at least one new root a month. Here’s where I started, cutting the recipe in half for both a side dish and next-day soup for two of us:

 


Recipe:

Celery Root and Anjou Pear Puree

 


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Allison St. Claire loves to dream about, study, grow, play with, prepare and ultimately enjoy eating great food.

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