There are few things that smell worse than a rutabaga cooking. One of my neighbors was cooking the darned stuff, and we thought there was a sewer leak or something. GAAH!!

My grandparents, on my mother's side, had a farm (apple orchard) in Eastern Washington. Me and my three girl cousins got to spend six weeks every summer there. Grandma prepared three huge meals a day, breakfast, dinner, and supper. They had a huge garden full of practically every kind of fresh vegetables. One of these vegetables were rutabagas, which were served cold in slices with turnips, radishes, carrots, and tomatoes. The thing that I remember most about the rutabagas was that they weren't grown every year. The other four, yes, but rutabagas only showed up now and then, usually with boiled parsnips. Rutabagas and parsnips were the exotic vegetables.