Cultural Appropriation and Pepperoni Rolls

For a non-conformist, I really enjoy being told what to do. A full-time freelancer spends a lot of energy creating order from chaos and rustling up work from thin air, so when I get an assignment from a client to develop a specific recipe, I'm happy to take it.

One of my clients, a large retail corporation, often gives me assignments to develop recipes for a mainstream American audience. I love working with the company, but I sometimes feel conflicted about developing recipes for an "Asian steak bowl" or a "Mexican rice skillet." The steak bowl is Asian because it features rice and some kind of soy marinade on the meat. The rice skillet is Mexican because it has corn, cumin, and chili powder. 

As a Caucasian mutt, I don't have a specific cuisine tied into my identity and family tradition, and so I never felt the sting of an outsider swooping down and flower-picking various ingredients and techniques for the sake of novelty...until a few weeks ago.

I grew up in Southeast Ohio, across the river from West Virginia. Four years ago, I moved back. It's more Appalachian than Midwestern, though in many ways it's simultaneously both things and neither of them. I call it the Appalachian Interzone. My parents, both native Ohioans, moved here 37 years ago, and people here in town still consider them outsiders. "Bir?" they'll say when I answer their inquiries about my last name ("Who are your parents?" is not a big-city question, but a small-town one). "Hmm, I don't know any Birs." While I find this scrutiny amusing, I see its usefulness; it's a simple attempt to tease out connections, create a community context. 

So I, too, am now an insider-outsider. Certain aspects I thought were universal during my youth I now see as highly regional, and one of those things is the pepperoni roll. 

There is nothing not to love about pepperoni rolls, unless you are an avid fan of nutrition, because there is nothing beneficial about them in that aspect. They are wads of cottony white bread stuffed with greasy, salty cured meat. A tiny bakery here in town made them; their version featured two pencil-thin sticks of pepperoni encased in the fluffy roll. One made an ideal snack; two, a satisfying lunch.

Pepperoni rolls hail from West Virginia. The lore says an Italian-American baker in Fairmont created them so coal miners could have a filling and portable lunch down in the mines. These days, you are more likely to find pepperoni rolls at a gas station or grocery store, but small-town bakeries still make them, too. Sometimes there is cheese in or on the roll. Sometimes pizza sauce is served on the side, or--gasp!--in the roll itself. I am a purist, and I like the rolls buttery and soft, with only pepperoni inside. 

There's also a sticks vs. slices debate. Though I once preferred the pepperoni sticks (the lunchmeat version of a chocolate baton in a pain au chocolat), I am now a convert to the slices, because they are better distributed in the roll and thereby leech more of the flavorful, bright orange grease into the bready interior. It's a déclassé version of brioche, almost. I love brioche. 

Currently I am working on a cookbook called Tasting Ohio: Favorite Recipes from the Buckeye State. The book collects recipes from chefs and food producers all over Ohio; it's meant to be a survey of Ohio's abundance and diversity, not a definitive encyclopedic tome on Ohio's regional foods. Pepperoni rolls initially didn't seem to be a good fit for the book, because they are the official state food of West Virginia (I say this literally, not figuratively--the WV state legislature passed the resolution marking it such in 2013), and Tasting Ohio is an Ohio cookbook. But I grew up in Ohio, eating pepperoni rolls. Ohioans up and down the Ohio River Valley did, too. Who am I to deny the Appalachian Interzone a voice in Tasting Ohio? It exists! I exist in the Appalachian Interzone at this moment!

I gave in to my misgivings. The rolls are going in the book. The classic homemade pepperoni roll recipe is insanely simple.

1. Buy Rhodes frozen dinner roll dough.

2. Thaw it.

3. Shape it into rolls with either slices or sticks (and perhaps, god forbid, cheese).

4. Bake. Cool somewhat. Eat.

I wanted to start with homemade roll dough, so I sniffed around for source recipes to compare, and in my research I came across a pepperoni roll recipe in Cook's Country. Cook's Country is the less austere sister publication of Cook's Illustrated. Both magazines take extreme pains to build fail-safe recipes that deliver what, in their eyes, are the best results possible. The Cook's Country pepperoni rolls had sesame seeds on top, which instantly tipped me off. They could not be the real deal! Never, ever have I seen pepperoni rolls with sesame seeds on top. Who did those Massholes think they were, plucking one of West Virginia's fine traditions and mucking it up to suit their elitist tastes?

It was my turn to be on the receiving end of Asian Steak Bowl fury. It riled me up enough that I didn't read the Cook's Country recipe, or the accompanying short article setting it up, so I can't go point my finger at them and cry "Columbusing!" That, by the way, is a newish term for appropriating an aspect of one culture and acting as if you discovered it. West Virginia, and Appalachia in general, is tragically misunderstood by most people in our nation. It's thought of as white trash, politically backwards, culturally bereft, and appallingly unsophisticated. Some of those assumptions are founded in reality, but West Virginia is also rich with folklore, extremely fertile in all aspects of the arts, and home to its own legitimate foodways. I know many smart, proud, and delightful West Virginians. Every time something good about West Virginia sneaks into the national consciousness, I want to give the state a fist-bump. But, just as the natural splendor of the state has been mined by greedy outside interests for its fossil fuels, so to have its food traditions been mined by superficial foodies who, say, want the cachet of ramps without understanding anything about the cultural meaning the plant has to rural mountain folk. I want pepperoni-loving people everywhere to be embrace pepperoni rolls, but I also want them to understand that they are a salt-of-the-earth delicacy, the street food of the coal mines. To render them foufy with sesame seeds is missing the point.

In my pepperoni rolls for Tasting Ohio, I use the fancy deli pepperoni slices, not the so-so Hormel stuff. I add honey and full-fat buttermilk to my dough, and brush the proofing rolls with melted butter. None of those things are standard issue in a typical pepperoni roll, but I feel I can get away with it, because I'm from here. Does it all come down to feelings and birthrights?

I attended a great panel discussion at this year's IACP conference called "Is What's Mine Yours? How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation in Your Writing." One of the speakers (I think it was Andrea Nguyen, an expert on Vietnamese cooking and never one to shy away from critical thinking) pointed out that appropriation is taking, while collaboration is giving. Giving credit, giving context, giving goodwill. Being mindful that a recipe is never just a recipe, and a seemingly innocuous white bread roll stuffed with pizza toppings is never just a roll. Is it okay to fling sesame seeds over them if you don't have roots in the Mountain State? Is it okay to include them in Tasting Ohio when you're a fringe element in the Appalachian Interzone? Is it justifiable to look Cook's Country in the eye and ask, "Who are your parents?" Good intentions go a long way, but good research goes further. What I can pull off in the privacy of my own home can't always be explained away in the few short sentences of a recipe headnote. Someone could write an entire book on pepperoni rolls. Someone should.

Maybe it shouldn't be me.  

The Taste of Violets

Despite the momentary cold snap, violets are popping up everywhere now. Last year at this time it settled into me as a slow-burning mania, and I decided I just had to make violet syrup. Read my essay here on Full Grown People to find out what happened (hint: it's probably not what you think happened).

I did discover a few things about violets.

• It takes baskets and baskets of violets to get anything close to enough for culinary applications with any kind of character.
• Some violets have more flavor and aroma than others.
• My front yard violets are bland, and whatever violets went into the violet extract my friend Nikki brought back from France and added to her violet buttercream are not bland.
• Adding lemon zest to violet sugar to punch up its flavor will make the violet sugar turn a muted fuchsia instead. It's the chemical reaction between the anthocyanins in the violets and the acid in the lemon zest (lemon zest isn't that acidic, but it's acidic enough, apparently) that dulls the color.
• My days of cooking with violets are probably finished. I think I got it out of my system. Picking violets is fun, but as far as edible rewards and foragables, I much prefer mushrooms, greens, and fruit.

That's the finished, faded violet sugar on the scones. It still tasted sweet.

Monster Cookies and the Beast of Inspiration

For food writers, maintaining a balance can be difficult. Most of us would have the public to think we spend our days in a photogenic sequence of tasting, pondering, journaling, and then mess-free tinkering in the kitchen.

But if you’re doing it right, this is definitely not the way it goes for anyone. The ebb and flow of deadlines seems to collide with spells of failed recipes and technical issues: a leak under the sink, a downed internet connection, a flat tire when you need to drive to a special store to get a very specific ingredient.

This is why I don’t like to blog. Writing about the mundane inconveniences I face may be honest, but it’s not very engaging. And I don’t want to project an airbrushed (or filtered, as it were) image of what my daily life consists of. There’s a lot of typing and a lot of using the internet and a lot of cross-referencing different recipes. There’s a TON of grocery shopping and washing dishes and wiping down kitchen counters and sweeping flour and crumbs off the floor.  

And there’s cooking. I get antsy if I go a few days without cooking. I taught a pressure cooking class this weekend, and I’ve been developing recipes for a few different assignments the past few weeks, so I’ve been in the kitchen a lot, but yesterday I realized I needed to just get in the kitchen and cook for fun.

That’s where the balance comes in. If you don’t make space in your schedule to lavish in the sheer joy of making food with no agenda, then your writing and your recipes won’t be inspired at all. You have to put yourself in the place that made you want to get into food writing in the first place.

So a few days ago I blocked out several hours and made the food I wanted to make. I minced the cores and stems of some broccoli and cauliflower, and I cooked them in a skillet with some olive oil until they were browned in some parts and soft in others. I made a miso dressing and cooked some quinoa and made myself a big bowl of healthy stuff, because that’s what I like to eat.

And then I cleaned up and went to pick my daughter up from school. Out of the blue she asked me if we could make monster cookies, and I said yes, even though monster cookies had absolutely nothing to do with any of the assignments or independent projects I had going on.

We needed to get M&Ms to make monster cookies. Without M&Ms, they are a different cookie. We got the M&Ms. We made the cookies. I experienced the small triumph of my parenting identity and my writer-chef identity intersecting peacefully. Most of the time I feel them tugging at one another, keeping me from being fully present in any one role, but for about fifteen minutes I was right in the zone with Frances. It felt good.

I though the freestyle cooking and the cookie-making sessions would set me behind the following day, but I wound up tearing through my to-do list. I also decided I needed to type up the monster cookie recipe, because I tinkered with it a bit, and I was happy with how those came out, too. Frances was even happier, though.

Monster Cookies

Makes about 2-1/2 dozen medium cookies

I don’t know too much about the origin of these. Why are they called monster cookies? What region are they most identified with? I do know they are popular here in southeast Ohio, they don’t contain any wheat flour, and despite that they are probably not gluten-free, because I’m sure M&Ms contain gluten somehow, and monster cookies are not monster cookies without M&Ms. Packed with candy and sugar, they are not health food, but they are hearty and wholesome and rich and peanutty. This recipe is an adaptation of an adaptation, like a modern folk song. Like “Louie, Louie” or “Hey Joe.” I love songs like that, and I love these cookies.

·         4 cups rolled oats

·         1-3/4 teaspoon baking soda

·         ½ teaspoon table salt

·         1-1/2 cups peanut butter (chunky or smooth, processed or natural)

·         ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

·         2 cups light brown sugar

·         2 large eggs

·         1 teaspoon vanilla extract

·         12 ounces (1-1/2 cups) semisweet chocolate chips or chunks

·         12 ounces (1-1/2 cups) milk chocolate M&Ms

1.       Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Arrange the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicon baking mats and set aside.

2.       If you’d like the oats to be a little more varied in texture, pulse them a few times in a food processor fitted with a metal blade, until some are powdery and others are still whole. Empty into a large bowl. Add the baking soda and salt and stir to combine. Set aside.

3.       In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine and peanut butter and butter. Beat on medium-high speed until smooth. Add the sugar and beat until lightened, about 2 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the vanilla.

4.       Add the oat mixture, one half at a time, and beat at low speed. Beat in the chocolate chips and M&Ms (you may need to do this with a sturdy wooden spoon instead of the mixer). The dough will be greasy and a little soft, but not crumbly.

5.       Scoop out the dough in rounded tablespoons (about 1-1/2 inches in diameter) and place 12 to a sheet. Bake for about 10-12 minutes, rotating the pans from top to bottom and back to front halfway through baking. The cookies will be lightly browned when ready, but their centers will still feel a bit soft to the touch. Let the cookies rest on the baking sheets for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Cookies will keep, tightly covered, for up to 5 days.

Transitions

It’s the first day of November. Walking the five blocks with my daughter to drop her off at her elementary school, we passed by two persimmon trees. Last week they were both in the throes of dropping ripe fruit, but now they are nearly bare. Every single day I had to fight off the urge to gather as many persimmons as possible, mainly because I didn’t have time to deal with them at home. Persimmons are not something you can sit on, literally and figuratively.

Last month I was facing the same dilemma with the last of the season’s pawpaws. It was a very good year for pawpaws here. I processed and froze maybe ten quarts of pulp, and who knows how many pounds of pawpaws I drug home. It was a tiny fraction of what I could have gathered hypothetically, but there are only so many hours in the day.

A sign that pawpaw season is on the outs. If you see a pawpaw like this one, for god's sake don't eat it. That rusty-looking orange tinge is oxidized and bruised flesh. This puppy is over the hill.

There are other tantalizing casualties of autumn: gingko nuts, crabapples. I can’t ever get as many as I would like. What I really want is for time to freeze, but that would be ultimately unbearable. The only thing that’s permanent is a state of transition. The cycles of time spin onward.

Career-wise, transition is also a permanent state for me. I’ve been gigging it as long as I’ve been in the food writing game, always cobbling together different jobs to piece together an income. For nearly a year, I’ve been editing the food section of the pop culture website Paste Magazine. The bulk of my food writing in the past ten months has gone there and not to this site, which is okay because I’m not heavy into blogging.

I also got deeper into the whole foraging thing, and it’s all been within walking distance of my house. Bringing unusual things home to eat is fun, but it’s going out there to look for them in the first place that helps me keep my sanity. There’s something about dragging five types of acorns home in my pockets that gives me a sense of purpose missing from being on the computer all day long, even if the only thing we do with the acorns is make them into goofy crafts. Humans can eat acorns—they were a staple food for many Native American tribes of California—but we’ve not made it that far yet. Rendering acorns into edible foodstuffs is work, more work than pulping our seedy native persimmons, even. I think I just like knowing this stuff is out there and I can groove on it for a little while before it’s gone.

The gigs are the same way, really. I get one and know it won’t be around forever, so I enjoy it while it lasts and keep my eyes alert for the next opportunity to replace it once it’s over. The pawpaws go away and the persimmons are waiting in the wings.

A lovely Diospyros virginiana.

A hope of mine was to share a persimmon fruitcake recipe—I made three versions of it, but it’s still not quite there. These are the small and wily North American persimmons, by the way, not the big and knobby Fuyus or Hachiyas, though you can generally substitute Hachiya pulp for the sweeter and grittier pulp of Diospyros virginiana.

So instead, I’m going to leave you with a wish that you’ll go outside—a park, your backyard, a trail, anywhere—and look around and think about the way everything is today. What does it smell like, is it cloudy or not, are there leaves on the trees. Are there trees at all. I’m always seeing these lists like “20 National Parks to See Before You Die”, and it breaks my heart a little, because there’s a whole world around you every day that wants to be noticed, and it’s a little different every time, offering patterns and cycles and surprises all at once.

Crabapples from the house next door to one of my favorite persimmon spots. Back in September I made these into jelly with a little habanero pepper for kick.

The Pawpaw Paradox / Scarcity and Abundance

Pawpaws have a powerful symbolic meaning to me as a reminder to move away from scarcity (the parts of my life that deplete me) and toward abundance (the things in my life that energize me, such as pawpaws).  However, wild pawpaws also embody scarcity and abundance in the most literal fashion possible, and I have been dealing with this in practice for the past few weeks.

In only ten minutes, I can walk to spots in the neighboring woods that are currently crawling with pawpaws. On a good day--like yesterday--if I'm really hoofing it, I can bring home about five pounds of pawpaws after ten short minutes of active searching. When I'm in the right mindset, it's almost as if the pawpaws just jump right off the trees and into my hands. They are unavoidable. Making use of them all is impossible. I could canvass the region for pawpaws, buy multiple giant freezers, devote myself full-time to capturing and processing them all, and still not make a dent in the county's pawpaw population.  

That wild seasonal abundance is what I consider a temporary infinite supply: the pawpaw paradox. Meanwhile,  the mass of pawpaw pulp that time realistically allows me to collect is finite. If I'm lucky, I'll come out of this season with about six quarts of frozen pulp, collected and extracted by my own loving hands. It's work I'm happy to do, and work that I don't consider work, but it does menace me, this pawpaw paradox. I hoard my pawpaw pulp and am reluctant to thaw and use it because once it's gone, it's gone. What if it's February and I need some for recipe testing? What if next year turns out to be a bad pawpaw year? When your culinary spirit animal is a fruit that's not grown on a commercial scale to speak of, the going gets tough.  Moderation is key.

Meanwhile, beautiful ripe pawpaws blacken and rot on the carpet of dry leaves out on the woods. This will happen for another two weeks, tops. We're spoiled by having everything we want at the snap of our fingers, be it produce, clothing, water, or visual and audio entertainment. The modern lives of the first-world bourgeoisie don't present us with much scarcity of anything, except for quiet time alone in nature. Luckily, the pawpaws don't need to be in season for us to access that.

It may not look like much on this screen, but this pawpaw is the centerfold of wild pawpaws.

On a side, note, I encountered yesterday the most wonderful feral pawpaw I've yet laid eyes on. One tree on my route was laden with about six giant pawpaws, ones that lit up the eyes of my inner food stylist. They are centerfold pawpaws. I tried to capture their beauty with my iPhone, but my skills could not do them justice. I processed the not-as-pretty pawpaws into pulp and drank a pawpaw lassi for breakfast this morning. It made me feel empowered and grateful. 

Pawpaw lassi, the breakfast of champions. Recipe is in my book!

Totally Grown-Up Halloween Candy Brownies

We don’t mess around here when it comes to over-the-top desserts. When faced with the curious problem of too much leftover trick-or-treat candy, I don’t just rip open a brownie mix and throw in handfuls of Twizzlers and Smarties. There has to be a method to the madness.

My method came about after our town’s untimely October 25 trick-or-treat night. We’d purchased an extra-large bag of candy, because we now live in a neighborhood that’s quite popular for commuting trick-or-treaters. Come the big night, though, we were all having so much fun meandering around from house to house with our friends and their kids that, by the time we got back home, the streets were empty; we didn’t hand out one piece of our trick-or-treat candy. “Give it to people who don’t have enough food!” Frances suggested. The concept of donating candy to a food pantry makes sense to a 4-year-old, but to me there’s something amiss with it to me, like dropping off moldy Reader's Digest Condensed Classics at a charity booksale.

So much effing candy.

For a few nights I nibbled an assortment after Frances went to bed: a Snickers bar, then a Twix, then a little pack of M & M’s. I should have been satisfied, but my hands kept creeping back to the candy bowl.  

As an adult, I find most candy too sweet and one-dimensional. Halloween candy does not hit the spot like it used to. Really, why do I bother eating it at all?

My husband started nibbling at the corner before these got a chance to cool. I like them better the next day, after they've set.

There’s another reason I should keep my distance from those little sugar-bombs in their shiny wrappers. I wrestled with an eating disorder for many years, and junk-food sweets were always my undoing. That’s why I never have that kind of stuff around the house. Just seeing a bowl of candy makes me feel compromised, distracted, and weak. It’s difficult to write about not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s challenging to articulate to anyone who hasn’t gone through something similar. People wouldn’t leave festive crack pipes and dime bags out in front of recovering drug addicts, but those of us who came out of disordered eating to have healthy, balanced relationships with food have to deal with this bullshit every year. It begins with Halloween and tapers off after New Year’s, when everyone freaks out about their holiday indulgences.

So this year, I decided to be the candy’s boss and make it into something worth eating—something so worth eating one or two amazing bites would do it. Taking a cue from Maida Heatter’s brownies layered with baked-in peppermint patties, I dug out my favorite brownie recipe, some fantastic raw ingredients, and a sharp and pointy knife. I unwrapped twenty Fun Size candy bars and chopped those fuckers up. I dropped them onto the brownie batter, shoved them into a hot oven, and told them to go to hell. Once they cooled, I cut them into tiny squares and ate one. A few hours later, I ate a second one. And then I was done, because I’d taken something shitty and made it into something awesome.

These witch and pumpkin picks are so cool. My mom saved them from the 1970s.

Totally Grown-Up Halloween Candy Brownies

Makes 36 small brownies

This is essentially candy bars bound with brownie batter, a baked confection. The batter itself is intense and bittersweet, something to offset the cloying candy. Cut them into tiny squares, like truffles.  

• 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
• ½ cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 2 large eggs, straight from the refrigerator
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract, optional
• ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 12 ounces Snickers and Milky Way bars, sliced crosswise into sections about ½-inch thick (this is 20 Fun Size bars)
• ½ cup chopped roasted peanuts (salted ones are nice, but unsalted will work, too)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. 

Melt the butter in a medium high-sided skillet over medium heat, keeping an eye on the pan so the butter does not burn. When the butter is quite hot (you may hear it sizzling or popping a bit), remove the pan from the heat and add the chopped chocolate. Stir once with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula and set aside to finish melting while you prepare the pan.

Line an 8 x 8-inch pan with foil or parchment paper, letting several inches hang over two opposite sides to create handles. Grease the pan and foil and set aside.

Now stir the chocolate and butter mixture until is smooth and the chocolate is completely melted. Beat in the sugar and salt, then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the vanilla, if using. Beat in the flour until the batter is smooth and shiny and a little tacky.

Spread half of the batter in the prepared pan. Lay the ¾ of the candy bar pieces on top of the batter in a mosaic fashion. Drop the remaining batter on top and smooth as best you can (it does not have to look perfect). Lay the remaining candy bars pieces on top, and then scatter the chopped peanuts over them.

Bake until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the pan comes out with moist crumbs, not raw batter (about 30 minutes, but this can be hard to gauge, since the caramel and melted chocolate will be gooey). Cool on a rack or place in the freezer until the brownies are cool and set. Using the parchment or foil handles, life the brownies out of the pan. Invert on a cutting board and peel off the foil or parchment. Place another cutting board on top and invert again, so that the brownies are nutty-side-up. Cut into squares (I prefer smaller ones, a little over an inch across) and serve. To me, these taste best the day after they were baked; when still hot from the oven, they’re impossible to cut nicely, and they’re so gooey all of the flavors run together.

One Pound, Eight Ounces of Parsnips

The parsnip seeds were about three dollars, purchased from a bulk bin at the hardware store. I’d bought them, along with some carrot and kale seeds, late in the summer for a second planting in the garden I shared with my dad. He spent hours tilling it, and then—with a little help from me, but not much--erecting a tall and sturdy fence to keep out the deer that gleefully munch at any blooming plant, decorative or not.

Dad and I share the garden because, here at my house across town, there’s not much of a yard, and I wanted more planting space than our small raised bed afforded us. Dad planted black-eyed peas and onions; I planted a ton of greens, along with peas and beans. The collards did well, as did the black-eyes, but nothing else thrived. In years past, my parents had multiple plots, in the largest size available, in a Columbus, Ohio community garden. They enjoyed bumper crops, which my mother canned in between nursing me and making healthful snacks for my older brother, who was a toddler at the time.

Decades later, I had spotty luck in my own past gardens prior to moving back here to Ohio, but I always got enough to feel it was worth my time and effort. I’m not sure what happened, but I do know we will do a soil test well before planting next spring.

The aforementioned parsnip seeds did nothing last year. This spring, I planted the remainder of the seeds in a row with the carrot seeds, to Mom and Dad’s objections. Why waste valuable garden space on pedestrian root vegetables? But I love parsnips, and at an average of $1.99 a pound at the grocery store, I don’t make a practice of buying them. I dreamed of the culinary possibilities of growing lots and lots of parsnips, which I would roast or puree. Parsnips to add to a white mirepoix, parsnips to grate and fry in non-conformist latkes, parsnips to add to simmering pots of braising meats. They are curious vegetables, at once mellow and sharp, at once creamy and fibrous. This dual nature amuses me. I enjoy how they keep me on my toes.

Lo and behold, both the parsnips and carrots grew. The carrots I harvested in August—they were petite things, and it took about half an hour for me to liberate them from the firm clay of Southeast Ohio gardens—but the parsnips I kept in the ground, imagining them growing into hearty, club-shaped things.

This weekend I dug them up. All one and a half pounds of them, and they had the willowy builds of runway models rather than the sturdier, more robust figures I’d been dreaming of. Smaller parsnips tend to taper off dramatically at their tips, quite unlike carrots, and so it’s challenging to get a consistent cut on them (important especially when roasting, for those narrow pieces tend to burn and shrivel rather than brown and crisp.) It took me about half an hour to wash, peel, and chop them into the 2-inch sticks I was planning to serve alongside our pot roast.

And a few of the parsnips I had to toss altogether, because they had a noticeable petroleum smell; most parsnips have a hint of this, but in older ones it’s especially prevalent. And parsnips often have woody cores running through their centers, so it’s best to cut those out and discard them. My yield from the initial 1.5 pounds was a generous handful of prepped root veg.

After roasting them at 400 degrees F for about 20 minutes, I pulled them out of the oven and chewed a sample. And chewed and chewed. It seems I’d made parsnip jerky. Gamely, I still heaped them on our dinner plates—I’d have been better off simmering the roots with the lovely red wine and onion broth that bathed out delicious pot roast—and I masticated through a few roasted parsnips batons.

My gardening know-how is low, mostly because I approach it in a very impulsive, slapdash manner. This is the way many people cook, so I can’t hold it against them. I don’t imagine I’ll have the time or drive to become a master gardener, or even a fluent one, but I’ll keep on trying, because it’s fun to see things grow…when they actually do. The parsnips were more like pets or amusements than anything else. Some people knit, some play Worlds of Warcraft, some go to NASCAR races. I grow edible plants, and badly at that. But I may even plant parsnips again, just to see if I can do better next year. The goal? Harvesting two pounds.