I made this turnip dish a little while ago because I wanted to have a vegetarian main dish on the table that would make my family feel full and contented. I didn’t want us all to feel gross, bloated, and sluggish. The Spawn and the Spouse were starting to mutiny about the volume of beans we’d been eating, and I was not about to put more cheese into our diet.
Then I found this dish.
Now, turnips were never part of my life growing up. In my head, they were something that happened in far-away Eastern European countries, the places with collapsing economies, bread lines, and a whole lot of vodka. (Look, the news chose what it wanted to show us, okay?) Anyway, root vegetables can also take a long time to cook and my parents were both busy people. I just didn’t get a lot of exposure to them.
Spouse and Spawn like them though, so I figured this would be a good compromise.
I fixed the dish. I didn’t make any changes from the original, which you can find in Olive Trees and Honey by Gil Marks.(It’s a fantastic book if you’re into vegetarian food, I turn to it all the time.) Since I didn’t make any changes, I can’t just copy the recipe and post it here.
What I can do is talk to you about it. The Spawn and Spouse loved this dish. They had seconds, and the Spawn never goes for seconds of my cooking. I mean never. I did use yogurt instead of sour cream, because I’ve always been suspicious of sour cream. Yogurt I get, but sour cream just… makes me think of dairy that’s gone bad, right?
Anyway. While Spawn and Spouse loved this dish, I was a little less impressed by it. I guess it’s adequate. The chickpeas give protein and fiber, the turnips give… poverty and sadness, I guess. The carrots give whatever it is carrots offer, beta-carotene or something.
And there we have the root of the problem ? I looked at this recipe, containing several ingredients I knew didn’t excite me and no ingredients that did excite me. And then I said, “Hey, I’ll make this for dinner.” And I was surprised when the dish didn’t do anything for me at all. Hmm… I don’t think the problem was the recipe!
I added a little bit of Aleppo pepper and that made everything better. I don’t know I’d go out of my way to make this again, but you can see the problem was solvable with a minimum of fuss.