Kohlrabi...it's what's for dinner.

My roommate was kind enough to pick up this week's Stillman's delivery for me. I'm starting to get a little overwhelmed by produce, but if there's anything I've learned from growing up in a big family it's that food will never -- indeed, shouldn't ever -- go to waste. So what do we do that is uniquely American? Freeze it. Freeze it all. From hotdogs to horseradish, from pastry to pasta. Freeze it. European refrigerators are the size of a normal top-freezer on a smaller US refrigerator. Approximately the size of the second fridge we had in our laundry room. We also had two industrial freezers in our basement. I'm actually just beginning to realize how weird this is. Moving on...

So this week, we were given one kohlrabi. Kohlrabi looks like this, although it does not, as a rule, levitate:

It doesn't look all that versatile, but allow me to say otherwise. It's German for "cabbage lettuce" and it's delicious. Crisp as a radish, it has a little bit of a radish-tang but tastes also a bit like cabbage. One of the sites I checked suggested that it was similar to a water chestnut, and I looooove me some water chestnuts. However, this particular piece of produce was under Captain Boyfriend's jurisdiction (hence the levitating). The Joy of Cooking suggested a dashingly simple recipe, one just begging for a little improvisation. As follows, take ye one kohlrabi:


and "matchstick" it:


Upon doing so, boil the matchsticks whilst you grate about 4 ounces of parmesan:

and perhaps decide to get frisky with some fresh rosemary (a taste that was poetically described this evening as a very open flavor. "It makes a lot of room in your mouth", were more or less the exact words, and I think this is a pretty accurate description of rosemary):

Once you've finished boiling the kohlrabi, which only takes about 5 to 10 minutes -- you want it to maintain some firm crispness -- add 2 Tbsp. of butter:

and mix in minced rosemary and the grated parmesan. Add some black pepper, too. Then make some rice pilaf courtesy of Zatarain's and steam some string beans and pour a pint of UFO's Raspberry Summer Wheat and make up your dinner, like so:
Then watch your boyfriend eat it with gusto, since making the food yourself makes it taste ten times better.


NEXT TIME: see the beet lurking behind the beer glass in the second-to-last photo? His days are numbered. Will he be borscht? Or will he live to tell the tale?