Root Vegetable

Cauliflower is one of my favorite vegetables. I love to jack it up with some bread crumbs and Parm and deep-fry it till it’s nice and brown. These are little bites of crunchy, cheesy, salty, heavenly loveliness. Add some garlicky goodness in the form of a dipping sauce and you have a showstopper!

Cipolline are flat, sweet Italian onions that look like little flying saucers. I love these guys because they’re like onion rings with no holes. Perfectly fried baby onions and garlic mayonnaise to dip them in—they’re out of this world!

For me, peppers are the gift that keeps on giving. Whenever I eat a roasted pepper it seems to stay with me forever. My sister, who’s a dietician, told me it’s because they have so little acid in them. Knowing this, I came up with a way to do two cool things—eat peppers without having them stick around all day and make a yummy peperonata—simply by adding a bit of sherry vinegar (a.k.a. acid) to the mix. The vinegar adds a lovely brightness to this dish, and the pimentón (smoked paprika) gives it a rich smokiness—both of which are unbelievably good with the creaminess of the goat cheese. Of course, you don’t have to serve this with goat cheese the way I do; you can make a batch of peperonata just to have in the fridge to throw on a sandwich—like a condiment—or to pull out and serve on bread when someone comes over for a drink. This is one of my personal super-secret flavor weapons!

I learned how to make this recipe in Tuscany, and who knew all these funky ingredients put together could taste SOOOOO delightful? Chicken livers? Anchovies? Capers? Believe it or not, all these super-strong personalities come together to make one really delicious pâté—and it’s so easy. Top this combo with some onions braised in balsamic vinegar and you’ve got yourself a super Tuscan!

Everybody likes fried food (if you say you don’t, you’re lying!), and these little guys are fried food done beautifully: a ton of zucchini held together by just a little bit of batter. They’re the perfect combination of salty, crispy, cheesy, and spicy all rolled into one. And, they’re a cinch to make: Do all your mise en place ahead of time; then you can make the sauce and the batter at the same time. Once you’re prepped, fry these babies until they’re really dark and crunchy. What we want here is crispy, crunchy, and dark. Woo-hoo!

So you went and invited everyone over for brunch one fateful Sunday morning. Sunday! The day you ordinarily sleep until eleven, don’t bother to wash your hair or change out of your pajamas, and end up watching TV upside down on the couch with newspapers and gossip mags strewn all over the floor. Tsk-tsk—it doesn’t sound to me like you’re quite ready for that hostess habit you picked up somewhere along the way. And yet here we are! Thank God there is this brunch-ready recipe you can prep the night before without even the most obnoxious of your foodie friends being any the wiser. Just get your dough and vegetables all set up and let them chill in the refrigerator overnight. Come morning, simply follow the quick baking instructions. If sweet potatoes sound too mushy for you, swap them out for 3/4 cup sautéed mushrooms.

Are you the type that religiously grabs whatever savory dinner leftover is in the refrigerator the following morning? Or maybe you’re the sort who is just as inclined to pull together a little salad as you are to devour a donut the second you roll out of bed. How about this: Do you prefer pancakes for dinner? I get it and I am right there with you. There’s no real rhyme or reason to what I eat and when, and some mornings I just can’t cope with the thought of an indulgent sweet, no matter how perfectly prepared. To this end, we need to give the savory breakfast back its gluten-free dignity. So I made some crepes. These guys are unimaginably easy to whip up, and it will take you no longer than fifteen minutes to have a hot, cheese-dripping meal set out before you. Plus they are pretty fancy-sounding, no? If you are too sleepy to caramelize the onion, these are just as good without it.

When you round the curve on Black Hawk Road in hilly Carroll County, you will see it on the left. In four-foot letters the name “Cox” is spelled out in boxwoods. About twenty years ago Mr. Cox started cutting his hedges into all manner of fanciful shapes. He has had a life-size cowboy wearing a Stetson and riding a horse, an alligator, a bird in a cage, and an elephant two times life-size. One of my favorites is a rabbit eating a carrot. Mr. Cox kind of has the temperament of Mr. McGregor in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. He has even snipped a self-portrait out of his hedgerow. It looks just like him, with a long beard and a farmer’s straw hat perched on his head. I love to go out and visit with him. He is a spirited old gent and he lets you know pretty quickly if he is in the mood for company or not. If I bring him a carrot cake, he seems more amiable.

Vegetarian shepherd’s pie is a fulfilling dish for a meatless meal. The kidney beans give it some heft.

The dance the Mashed Potato was all the rage after James Brown incorporated it into his rousing live show and review with his band the Famous Flames. Under a contract with a recording label that did not think much of the idea, in 1959 Brown took the song down to a friend’s studio in Florida and recorded the hit song “(Do the) Mashed Potato.” So he would not run afoul of his own label, Brown billed the song as Nat Kendrick and the Swans and the lyrics were attributed to one of Brown’s aliases, Dessie Rozier. Soon the nation was whipped up in the craze with two other hit songs, “Mashed Potatoes U.S.A.” and “The Mash Potato Man.” It is fun to use purple potatoes the same color as James Brown’s famous cape to make mashed potatoes while having a kitchen dance party with the kids.

My in-laws grew up in Indiana. My husband grew up in a meat-and-potatoes type of home. This changeable delectable potato dish can match up with anything. The potatoes inside are tender and flavored with the broth and the potatoes on top are nicely crisped and browned.

These glazed rutabagas look like topaz when cooked down with brown sugar, cider vinegar, and butter. My friend Jule adores rutabagas and thrift store jewelry. I came up with this dish for her.

I was a boy-crazy preteen when I went on a trip to visit my friend’s grandmother Beauxma in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, in the sugarcane-growing region of the state. I was so taken by the story of the Evangeline Oak. In 1907, St. Martinville author Felix Voorhies wrote Acadian Reminiscences: With the True Story of Evangeline, inspired by tales told to him by his grandmother. The account of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux is said to be about the real people behind Longfellow’s tragically romantic poem “Evangeline,” about a woman looking for her lost love, Gabriel. In 1929, Hollywood came to town and filmed the movie Evangeline, starring Dolores Del Rio in the title role. After the filming, a statue of Evangeline (looking a lot like Dolores Del Rio) was erected on the spot marking the alleged burial place of Emmeline Labiche. As a whole, Southerners have never let the truth stand in the way of a good story; and now the stories of Emmeline and Louis and Evangeline and Gabriel have fused into one story told time and again beneath the spreading branches of the Evangeline Oak. In fact, Louisianans have taken the story so to heart that the Evangeline variety of sweet potato is fast becoming one of the state’s most popular sweet potatoes.

My cousin Daniel Foose fell in love with a girl he met in music school. Sueyoung Yoo and Daniel married out at our family farm, Pluto, on what might have been the hottest day that year, Saturday, June 30. Friends and family began to arrive the Wednesday before. As the bride and groom are both accomplished jazz musicians, she a pianist and he a bassist, most of the bridal party came with instruments in tow, and late-night jams filled the evenings. Sueyoung made kimchi, massaging each leaf of cabbage with rich chile paste and placing it in her groom’s great-grandmother’s soup tureen. Her soon-to-be in-laws, Uncle Jon and Aunt Caroline, had driven from Austin with a plug-in home-size chest freezer in the back of their Suburban rigged to a battery and filled with all sorts of slow-cooked Creole and Tex-Mex food for the reception. The reception came together in an eccentric perfection combining cooking from New Orleans, Korea, Mississippi, and Texas; and the band played well into the night. It is a joy to have Sueyoung in the family. Now out at Pluto we have kimchi buried in the yard and Korean barbecue is served on Christmas night.

Egyptian walking onions do just that; they walk their way across a garden. These unusual plants produce clusters of onion sets at the top of their stalks. As the sets at the top mature and become too heavy for the stalks to hold them upright, they lean over to the ground and replant themselves, traveling across the yard. When the new sets are buried, a petite onion will form. Once these are established they will travel, producing onions along the way, for years. The onions harvested from walking onions are very similar to pearl onions and, like their cousins, are delicious creamed.

The Palestine Gardens is a miniature replica of sites from the Holy Land built down in the piney woods around Lucedale, Mississippi. For sixteen years Reverend Walter Harvell Jackson and his wife searched for a place to build his Bible-themed garden. After seven years of construction, the forty-acre garden opened in 1960 with Bethlehem, Jericho, and Jerusalem all constructed out of concrete blocks, and with its own Dead Sea. It has expanded over the years to include the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem artichokes do well in the kind of sandy soil and full sun they have down there in George County and will thrive in most gardens, producing the edible tubers and brilliant yellow sunflowers. I like to serve this over Israeli couscous, of course.

A tangerine, sometimes called “kid glove orange” because of the way its loose skin will slip off, has such a sweet, bright flavor when at its peak around November. This salad is fine-looking with light variegated shades of green set with vivid sections of citrus and golden challah croutons dusted with tarragon.

This composed warm potato salad came together as a dish for my father. It has all the salty, tart flavors that he loves.

The rhyme that goes “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe” has sent many a bride down the aisle. A sixpence is hard to come by these days, so many brides in these parts use a copper penny from the year they were born to help ensure a prosperous marriage, good luck, and protection against want. A few have a trinket for their charm bracelet made after the honeymoon. Cutting carrots into rounds and marinating them in the dressing gives them a burnished look like copper pennies. It’s nice to serve this at engagement parties celebrating a bride-elect.

When I see the river rise and hear the birds sing, I think of my late dear friend Charlie Jacobs and his tune “Rhythm of Spring.” His association between native produce and more innocent days elevates the memory of spring smells to a sort of romance. He beguiles us. And he tells us that from our soil comes the ingredient we need to find meaning. When I make this soup in the first cool days of spring, I’ll serve it warm, and when the days begin to lengthen and turn warm, I like to serve it cool.