I am married to an Englishman. Two of my best friends are from Commonwealth countries, Scotland and Australia. One of the biggest food differences I see between the U.S. and Commonwealth countries are the use and acceptance of root crops. Here in the U.S. we are a more “potato on its own” country and our Commonwealth friends are more “throw any root crop together and it will be delicious” kind of people.

Let’s try the latter, shall we? This week we are getting beautiful potatoes, rutabagas and/or turnips. You can do anything with a rutabaga or turnip that you can do with a potato. Rutabagas might take a little longer to cook than potatoes and turnips, but only a little.

Sometimes if I am peeling and cooking something I like to do a big batch for several meals during the week. I am going to peel and dice all my root crop vegetables in my CSA share this week. I will cook them and separate them for two different uses.

Here they are all peeled and chopped up. This will probably be enough for at least two dinners and probably two lunches for two of us.

I had some chicken stock in the refrigerator. It wasn’t enough to cover the vegetables so I added some milk. You could do this with any kind of stock or water even. I added an onion and a few cloves of garlic (I wish I had leeks) and set this on to boil until all the vegetables are soft.

This is after an hour of gently boiling.

I am going to let this cool a little and take half out for later this week and make a ‘mash’. I will just mash this like mashed potatoes. In England they call this a ‘mash-up’. I’ll save some of the cooking liquid with the vegetables for my mash up. The half left in the pan will be soup for tonight. I’ll probably hit the contents of the pan with an immersion blender but you could leave yours chunky.

Super easy and much more interesting than just potato soup or mashed potatoes by adding a few other root vegetables.

Have a great week.

Mo