Turn to your roots — Out-of-favor vegetables are starting to become popular again

They're the wallflowers of the veggie world — turnips, parsnips and rutabagas. Compared to glamorous produce such as asparagus and tomatoes, they seem dull and boring.

Depending on how they're cooked, they can end up with spongy textures, strong odors and harsh flavors, adding further to their image problems.

But before refrigeration and global shipping of food, root vegetables were the mainstay of winter diets. In the fall, farm families would store such items as potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips and rutabagas in an underground cellar (hence the term "root cellar"). In a cold, dry environment, these vegetables could keep for several months — until the first greens of spring showed up.

Today, you can run to the grocery store in January and find fresh baby lettuce, artichokes or avocados shipped from warmer climates. Consequently, these old-fashioned vegetables, long associated with hardship, fell out of favor. But with farmers markets and the "eat-local" mantra gathering steam, people may well turn to their roots, so to speak.

"I grew a lot of them a few years ago and couldn't sell them," said John Borski, a Kaysville farmer and regular at the Downtown Farmers Market. "But now people are looking for something different, so some of those unpopular vegetables are starting to become popular. I could probably sell them now. "

Borski and his wife, Heather, recently used some of their home-grown parsnips in a pasta recipe from Cooking Light. "It was light and healthy, with squash and different seasonings like cinnamon and sage," he said.

More root vegetables are also showing up on a few trendy menus. A signature dish at New York City's Union Square Cafe is creamy mashed yellow turnips (they're actually rutabagas) with crispy shallots.

Beets, another root vegetable, came into vogue a few years ago when stylish chefs studded salads with roasted beets in hues from gold to purple. Sweet potatoes have also found new fans, appearing in soups, souffles and even french fries. But it may take more coaxing to start a rutabaga renaissance.

For starters, there's the name. (To paraphrase Shakespeare, would a rutabaga by any other name sound more appealing?) And turnips also have a stigma — consider the saying, "I didn't just fall off a turnip truck."

Parsnips often get passed up because they "look like dirty anemic carrots," the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine wrote in their book, "Perfect Vegetables" (America's Test Kitchen, $29.95).