That's Not a Turnip!

CSA season is over.

But I had these hangers on, chillin' in my vegetable drawers, just bein' roots.

OB-Vious-Ly
celeriac (celery root), turnips, and fennel

I was going to cook them down in the friendly-to-freezing forms.  Roast the celeriac & turnips to give them a toasty bitterness - help balance the sweet they have intrinsically.  More on that in a future post.

Whoops!  Some roots I had blithely assumed were turnips, turned out to be…

A kinda cool thing, you can see that the radish and turnip have a similar radial structure inside.
If I had a white radish and a white turnip
and had to pick them apart on thin cross-section,
 I might be stumped.
But very different texture and smell.

RADISHES!  Watermelon radishes.  Now, to be fair, they were the same size as the turnip, and had the same white with a purple rash on the outside the way the turnip did - but they also had a green blush.  (Does that even make sense?)

But, hmmm change of plans.

Continue on the roasting road for the actual turnip (1 turnip is not enough for soup… unless I add it to the celeriac.  That's a thought.)

Time to pickle my radish!  Yay!

Speaking of cool patterns, look at the shapes the red vessels make in the white.
And the layers…
Makes me think of thai fruit carving.

All chopped up and ready to go!

So I went with the 3rd radish solution - quick-pickled Japanese sweet & sour style.

I'll start eating you tomorrow!

Which just goes to show, even when you think you've got it under control, the funniest things can surprise you.  Today's radish warns me not to get all know-it-ally and complacent.

But since I found kvass the other day, Imperial Kvass no less, that won't happen today.

at Star Fruit & Vegetable
(right next to Yeh Yeh's -should be famous- Vietnamese sandwiches.)