Cooking by its nature is experimentation: sometimes you discover a wonderful formula and sometimes you kill the lab rats! Lately I have had a yen for earthy flavours. This may be due to having just read Stanley Park, but for whatever reason, I just had to do something with the burdock root I came across  recently in my health food store. Unfortunately, the troops at home do not share my sense of culinary wanderlust. Sometimes I have to resort to blind studies.

If I told my kids that I was trying to feed them the root of a plant that they would normally find along the river banks, covered with nasty burrs, they would think that I had finally gone round the bend. They had already endured my taste-testing sessions with hemp foods and obscure ancient grains like quinoa and kasha, and although I think that they actually enjoy tofu now, this would be my biggest challenge to-date.

Burdock is one very ugly root. It certainly didn’t help my cause any when my childish sense of humour kicked in and I lay a piece of this muddy stick with its fibrous ends on the stairs where our kitty sometimes leaves his token of disapproval. ( If you don’t have a cat, you can ask someone who does have one what a cat will do when you upset him.) Both boys were fooled into thinking that kitty had left a particularly large statement on this occasion and Paddy wrapped it in paper towel and threw it out. Liam just stepped over it; it was too gross to touch. As you could well imagine, trying to feed the boys burdock after this little prank was not going to happen without a little subterfuge.

I had hastily purchased the burdock before really reading up on this root and realized that I hadn’t really chosen a good piece. There are two species of edible burdock. The wild North American variety which was the one I had purchased at my health food store, and the Asian species, which is called gobo by the Japanese. There is a very noticeable difference between these two types. The North American variety is generally shorter, 4-12 inches long and looks more like a crooked stick. The Japanese variety can be up to 3 feet long and is thicker in circumference. Whichever kind you buy, make sure that the flesh is firm, wrinkle-free and the root is heavy. The boys were in luck; the burdock that I had purchased was already turning prune-like and I would have to get more if I wanted to give it favourable odds in the cooking crap-shoot.

I went this time to the Japanese grocer next door to the health food store. After looking bedazzled into a cooler filled with strange sticks and roots and fungi, I finally picked up a package of what looked to be four, 6" pieces of the root I wanted. I asked the vendor if this was burdock and he said, “Gobo?” Luckily I had done my reading and knew that this was the Japanese word for burdock.