In the summer you want fresh, light and sort of quick things; in winter you want things that are comforting, so your body really tells you you want to go towards potatoes, apples, fennel, things that are warm and comforting. And loin of pork.
My go-to winter recipe is beef and butternut squash stew, cooked in the slow oven all day.
Nobody ever says, "Can I have your beets?
It's funny; as I get older I'm reverting to my roots - I want to plant stuff.
I love potatoes - roast potatoes, mashed potatoes - I just love potatoes.
The only good things I've seen emerge from a steamer are tamales, couscous, and dumplings - maybe the occasional artichoke or delicate fish fillet. But baby turnips with their tender greens still attached should be boiled in water as salty as the sea until their flesh is silky and soft.
For dinner, I have at least four or five different vegetables of all colors: purple, orange, green and red. I eat as many colors as possible, including carrots, broccolini, asparagus, cauliflower, kale and more.
I love root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, and turnips.
I also have a lot of preserved foods, things that will keep for a long time like dried fish, seaweed or lotus seed.
I'll never forget my first experience of swede. It was at school and I thought I was getting mashed potato. I've never got over it.
There's nothing more marvelously wintery than orange root veg mash; some butter is all it needs.
Jerusalem artichokes have a great affinity with nuts. I love them with chopped walnuts or almonds, lemon juice, garlic, herbs and plenty of olive oil.
I'm Irish, so I'm used to odd stews. I can take it. Just throw a lot of carrots and onions in there and I'll call it dinner.
I've always liked root vegetables because most of them have a natural sweetness. They have a high fructose content, especially when you cook them and caramelize them in a saute pan. Or you can take a turnip and cook it slowly in the oven until it's browned, and it takes on a kind of sweetness. These vegetables are pretty easy to like.
Every radish I ever pulled up seemed to have a mortgage attached to it.
I very much like potatoes.
I'm a beet freak. I put them in the pressure cooker.
I love to roast vegetables - carrots, fennel, and so on. I also love to mash or puree pretty much any vegetable!
I was raised almost entirely on turnips and potatoes, but I think that the turnips had more to do with the effect than the potatoes.
On some subconscious level, I've been prejudiced against turnips, parsnips, swedes and other roots. Do they taste of much? Are they really special? How wrong I was.
There's nothing like a roast parsnip, you don't want them too chewy though.
I farm taro. I have eight varieties of taro, which is a staple of the Hawaiian people from about 2,000 years ago, and sweet potatoes, and it's a sustainable living, agriculture, off the grid.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
There's something about fall that very much translates into those nurturing, nostalgic food flavors. It's the season where you can really make the marriage of fresh produce with spices and aromatics.
Everything that pushes up out of the earth I love. Everything under the earth, root vegetables, I love to cook.
