Passover is traditionally very difficult for us. We start planning meals at least a month in advance, littering cookbooks with sticky notes so we can quickly reference recipes that will make this year's efforts better than the last. We have long, deep discussions about the delicious, permissable foods we will make ahead of time, so that grabbing lunch on the way out the door in the mornings will be painless. Unfortunately, all this pre-meditation tends to end right where it starts - in the cookbooks with the sticky notes. The last time we felt inspired was six years ago in our tiny kitchen in Queens. Twice baked potatoes were going to revolutionize our week, saving us from the despair of stale Passover cereal and matzo pizza. So we spent 45 minutes putting together the state-of-the-art, never-before-used food processor we got for our wedding and went to town on the dozen potatoes that would change our life. Trying to get the potatoes out of the skins proved much simpler than we imagined, so we proceeded with confidence. And then it happened. The blow to the jugular was the metal blade. Yes, I'm pretty sure that everyone knows you never use the metal blade when processing potatoes, but we were ignorant and shunned the mundane details of the instruction manual. So in went the metal blade and out came piles of gummy, potato-like mash that seemed to be infused with hair gel. We stuffed the goop into the skins anyway, hoping that the baking process would change the embarrassment that our potatoes had essentially become, but no bueno. Our dishwasher-less kitchen was wrecked and every single pot, pan, utensil and complex food processor part that had dashed our hopes had to be dealt with. Since we refused to waste the potatoes, we suffered through the week. Poetically, suffering is exactly what Passover is all about, so maybe it was destined. Whatever the case, that year pretty much set the precedent for our family's most festive holiday.
Suffering is all fine and dandy until you have tiny mouths to feed. Mouths that demand flavor, variety, exactly the right consistency in every bite. Somehow we knew our kids weren't going to settle for brittle thin sheets of matzo and greasy baba ghanoush from the grocery store, so we had to up the ante. We had macaroons, cheese and eggs. We had a lifetime supply of matzo and even some marinated salmon in the freezer, ready to go in case of an emergency. So Wednesday we had matzo brie, a Passover cultural imperative. Midway through cooking it up with cheese and butter, it occurred to me that I could add some green onions into it, but since my 22-month old was literally clinging to my leg and wailing for dinner, I forewent any lavish plans. The matzo brie was great, but Thursday night's meal was a revelation. Being forced to eat new things through community supported agriculture led me to what will now be a lifelong love of the most humble of vegetables - the turnip. Yep, turnips. Who knew, right? In this week's delivery, we got a few tiny turnips on the end of an enormous batch of greens. While Farmer Gene promised more in the coming weeks, they were so delicate and cute that I didn't have the heart to waste them. I roasted them up and served them with the turnip greens and salmon. These minuscule roasted turnips stole the show. Until that moment, I thought potatoes were the perfect food (aforementioned incident not withstanding), but turnips are the new sheriff in town. Roasted turnips are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G –– crisp on the outside and creamy on the inside, with a subtle earthy flavor. I couldn't wait to experiment with our next batch. Believe it or not, I actually considered steaming them up and popping them into the food processor to see if they would mash up well, but then I remembered the metal blade and broke out in a cold sweat.
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