The perfect recipe for those January blues

Suffering from January blues? Here’s the cure — a big pot of bubbling stew and even if you never cooked a thing in your life you can do this. 

Funds are probably low, it’s so easy to overspend both before Christmas and in the January sales so in this column I’ll focus on how to make several yummy meals from one of the least expensive seasonal ingredients — the humble swede turnip. All root vegetables are at their very best in winter. Parsnips, carrots, celeriac, Jerusalem artichokes and swede turnip all become even more delicious after a few night’s frost where the low temperatures transform the starches into sugars. Same happens with fancy salsify and scorzonera and we’ve also been enjoying both oca and yakón — root vegetables that you can easily grow yourself if you can source the tubers. Contact the The Organic Centre in Leitrim: www.theorganiccentre.ie.

But never mind, we’ll focus on a vegetable that can be bought from any village shop or Farmers’ market. Try if you can to source local and fresh. Sorry to keep harping on about this but if we continue down the route of below cost selling the few remaining Irish vegetable growers who are hanging on by their finger-tips will not be able to survive. We are totally sleepwalking into a crisis where unless you grow your own, fresh Irish produce will be virtually unobtainable. I can’t imagine how a turnip that spends up to 5 months in the ground can be sold for as little as 49 cents. Well, enjoy while you can, all that nourishment and deliciousness for just a few cent. The versatile swede turnip was first introduced into Ireland in the 1800s. It was a very important agricultural development, a vegetable sown in winter that could stay in the ground until needed. Turnips grow on top of the ground so could be harvested easily, and didn’t need to be stored in a shed plus the farmer could nourish and feed both his family and his livestock with this inexpensive vegetable which originally grew wild in Sweden, hence the name.