Daria Can Cook – and so can you!

You could call Trent and I postmodernists after tonight’s unexpected flavor combination, or multiculturalists, or hippie whole foods liberals, or any other number of epithets. But I’d like to humbly add that you could also call us geniuses.

That’s right, friends: tonight’s seat-of-our-pants soup was fabulously flavorful, relatively painless to make, filling, and nourishing. Win win win win. I present to you: Culturally Confused Vegetable Stew.

Why culturally confused? Well, wild rice, which is actually the seed of a grass plant and not rice at all, is a staple among indigenous peoples from the Great Lakes region. Pumpkin, coconut milk, and cumin are associated with Indian food (you know, the Indians our old friend Christopher Columbus thought he had found when he got to the New World). I associate turnips with the Brits, but Wikipedia tells me that the Greeks and Romans were pretty into them too. In short, this seems like the perfect dish to commemorate Columbus’s ambiguous adventure, which the U.S. recognized yesterday.

Culturally Confused Vegetable Stew: The Recipe

Ingredients:

1 small sugar pumpkin

1 large turnip (look at that monster turnip!! I thought it would eat us before we ate it!)

1 cup wild rice

4-5 cloves garlic, to taste

1 can coconut milk (we used light because that’s all our Trader Joe’s sells)

1 tbsp garlic chili paste (we use sambal oelek, made by the Sriracha people)

Cinnamon, salt, and freshly ground cumin (buy the seeds, toss them in a coffee grinder, be amazed at how incredibly flavorful freshly ground spices are), to taste

Lime juice (optional)

Special Tools:

Food processor

 Method:

1. Slice the pumpkin and turnip into roughly 1 inch square pieces. (Reserve pumpkin seeds to roast later, if you’re so inclined)

2. Place on a baking sheet and bake for 30-40 minutes in a 425 degree oven. You can roast your individual garlic cloves along with the veggies, or you can wrap a whole head of garlic in foil and roast the whole shebang. Use the extra for garlic toast. Mmmmm.

3. Meanwhile, add 1 cup wild rice to 4 cups water. Bring to a boil and cook until the water has all been absorbed (about 45 minutes), stirring occasionally.

4. When the pumpkin has cooled, peel off the skin.

5. In batches, puree the pumpkin, turnip, garlic, coconut milk, chili paste, and spices in your food processor.

6. Add the puree to the wild rice, stir it all up, reheat if necessary. Garnish with lime juice and enjoy!

This made a very thick soup, as you can see. You could add water, stock, or more coconut milk to make a thinner soup if you’re not so into thick stews.

To make it an even more diverse dinner, Trent ate his soup with rye toast. Foodie multiculturalism represent!

Do you have any favorite nontraditional food combinations? And can you believe the size of that turnip? I mean seriously!

Related posts:

1. Dumple dumple
2. Roasted Root Veggie Mash