Turnip Greens

I have a love-hate relationship with turnip greens. Turnip roots work well in my repertoire – I know how to cook them and how to serve them. The greens are a different matter. They are very bitter, and since they are not featured in the culinary environment in which I grew up, they don’t have an effortless place in my eating habits. But that makes them a challenge, and I do like that.

The bitterness of turnip greens can be nicely offset by something sweet. I think fruit works well. When we got baby turnips in one of our fall CSA boxes, I paired them with brown butter pears and some pork chops from the fridge that Paulus may or may not have intended to make into schnitzels (see this post for more about not cooking schnitzel).

The turnips were roasted in the oven together with potato cubes, dressed in just a little bit of olive oil and salt. I sautéed some onions and pureed them together with the blanched turnip greens and a little bit of pear. The rest of the pears were pan-roasted in butter and the salty bits left over from cooking the pork chops. And then everything was served on top of the turnip green puree in bite sized pieces so that you could get a little bit of everything in a perfect bite.

Perhaps my next step should be to serve turnip greens with schnitzel?

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