1. Preheat oven to 450°.

2. Peel and chop the turnip, sweet potato, carrots, and potato, and mix together in a large bowl with the fennel and onion. Add the thyme, salt, pepper, and red pepper, and then stir in the orange juice and melted butter.

3. Oil a large baking dish, and spread the vegetable mixture thinly across the bottom. Cook for 25 to 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. Halfway through the baking, add in the garlic.

4. Remove from the oven when the vegetables are soft, and stir in the parsley.

Locals like you: Attila Berry

Attila Berry is a native Arkansan who grew up in Yellville. Her family always had a huge garden and a coop full of contented chickens. She recently returned to Ozarkansas after two and a half years spent sailing in the Caribbean and up the Pacific coast of Central America on a 36-foot sailboat. She now lives in Fayetteville with her husband and 2-year-old son, and is enjoying all the fancy coffee the region has to offer.

She has a particular relationship with turnips, which were common at her childhood dinner table. She said that, while turnips can be readily found at farmers markets and grocery stores, they are rarely featured on a menu or at a dinner party.

These white, bulbous roots are nutritious, containing a significant amount of vitamin C, as well as calcium, manganese, and potassium, and the greens contain vitamin A, vitamin K, folate, calcium, and copper. Still, it took her awhile to acquire a taste for turnips.

“When I was growing up, my dad grew turnips in his garden and forced me to eat them,” Berry says. “They were my most-hated vegetable, both bitter and bland to my overzealous taste buds, and, in one of those cruel childhood jokes, we seemed to eat them all the time. But as I got older, the turnip turned palatable, nostalgic even, and that bitter taste took on a honeyed edge.”

On occasion, she cooks them for her family, simply roasted in the oven with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Her father cooks turnips in his signature Christmas dish – a festive mixture of sweet potatoes, turnips, onions, and potatoes called the winter medley.

“I wonder how I could have ever had such disgust for something with such an interesting taste, an acrid flavor mingling with a rich sweetness, a melding of starch and sugar, neither boring like the potato nor common like the carrot.”