Turning Veganese

A dude at my farmer’s market sold me some parsnips and told me they make great raw sushi. I had to think about it. I don’t make a lot of raw food except for salads, guacamole and salsa. This is one of the reasons I’m fascinated by Melissa’s raw cheesecake.

I’m a little lazy so I skipped Stan’s advice (my farmer’s market friend). He told me to chop these roots coarsely. I put two of them into my food processor with the shredding blade. They’re pretty big, I’m not even sure they’re really parsnips since the ones I grew up with were small, pointy and a little sweet and these weren’t so much. Who knows. I’m not a rocket scientist. They worked fine for what I was using them for. I suspect cauliflower would work well too. I showed the picture to my cousin who is a real farmer and he suggested that they might be a kind of Japanese radish called “Daikon”. Wow, he’s smart. The flavor of the plain root was crisp and clean with a very mild spice. This recipe is loaded with fiber, vitamin A, C, E, omega fatty acids, and essential amino acids to name a few. It’s low in fat, has no cholesterol, no hormones, and no synthetic antibiotics.

I dumped this into a large bowl, added a tablespoon of tahini, half a teaspoon of maple syrup (if you use parsnip, you probably won’t have to add a sweetener), a dash of ponzu sauce and a few dashes of rice wine vinegar. I mixed it with my hands… if you’ve got little kids I bet they’d like that part. I tasted it until it was slightly sweet and slightly salty and with just a hint of tartness, like regular sushi rice. After that, I spread out about 3/4 cup onto a sheet of nori and added the fillings. In this case – carrot, mustard greens (stems removed) and avocado.

I used moisture from the bottom of the “rice” bowl to seal the edges. The first roll of these fell apart while I was trying to cut it. I started wrapping them up in 2 sheets of nori. I realize my rice was too wet. By the third try, they were pretty enough to get a picture. They took very little time to prepare: no waiting for things to heat or cook. They were also exquisitely tasty with soy sauce.

This is Christie, signing off… to attack that last “parsnip”.