I’m down on the coast of the Florida panhandle for a few days. Whenever I get down here, I crave the Gulf shrimp I grew up eating. Their plump flesh is so sweet, clear and succulent, much more like lobster than the shrimp that come from more turbulent waters.

Last night, we boiled some fresh shrimp with sausages and the best-looking vegetables we could find. For the boil, I brought a large pot of water to a boil with 3 quartered lemons, a packet of Crab Boil, a few bay leaves, a splash of white wine and a few sprigs of thyme. I simmered the water for about 10 minutes to bring the flavors out of the Crab Boil, then started adding the main ingredients.

I tossed in a few halved andouille sausages and quartered russet potatoes, and simmered those for 10 minutes. I cut a head of cauliflower into florets, added those and simmered for another 10 minutes. When the potatoes and cauliflower were almost tender, I added the green beans and the shrimp. I simmered everything for one more minute, then turned off the heat. By the time everyone grabbed a bowl and lined up at the pot the shrimp were just cooked through.

Sipping white wine, peeling and eating the shrimp and looking out over the Gulf just felt good.

Recipe: Penne With Shrimp, Asparagus, Serrano And Mint
Recipe: Shrimp Tacos With Cabbage, Avocado Feta And Cilantro
Reference: What is the difference between a shrimp and a prawn?

I’ve been cooking with turnips the past few days for this week’s root source. (Subscribe here if you haven’t already). Even though turnips are a wintry root vegetable, they’re bright, crisp, watery and peppery, similar to a radish or jicama.

Yesterday afternoon, after a few days of testing richer, cooked turnips dishes, I wanted to get into some raw turnip. I remembered a classic Mexican way to prepare jicama. You cut it into dowels, sprinkle it with chili powder and salt, and then spritz it with lime. Seemed like it would work for turnips, too.

I peeled a turnip, squared off its round edges, cut it into wide slices and then lengthwise into dowels. I put the dowels onto a plate, sprinkled them with cayenne pepper and a little sea salt, squeezed a half a lime over them and added a few cilantro leaves on top.

They were delicious, with that same bursting crunch as jicama. They’d be good chilled alongside a warm burger, quesadilla or burrito. A margarita wouldn’t hurt either.

Recipe: Pork Burgers With Avocado Dressing (Cookthink)
Recipe: Cheese Quesadillas With Coriander And Marjoram (Cookthink)
Recipe: Chicken Burrito With Black Beans, Red Peppers And Avocado (Cookthink)

With the launch of the Cookthinktank, we opened up Cookthink to new voices. We love having recipes from some of our favorite food bloggers on the site. The next voice we want to hear is yours.

Many of you already subscribe to the root source, the weekly email we send out every Thursday. In each root source, we focus on one ingredient and chew over the best ways to buy it, store it, prep it and cook with it.

What the thousands of root source subscribers tell us they love most about it are the links to recipes that feature that week’s ingredient. That’s where the Root Source Challenge comes in.

Every Tuesday, we’ll announce the subject of the root source three weeks out. To participate, email us a link to your best recipe using that ingredient. We’ll pick our favorite, feature it in the root source and publish it on Cookthink.com. (We’ll post a round-up of other favorite recipes here at the Cookthink blog.) We’ll also send a cookbook to the person who submits the featured recipe.*

To participate, all you need to do is send an email to rootsourcechallenge [at] cookthink [dot] com with your name and email address, the name of your blog and a permalink to the recipe. (If you don’t have the recipe online, just include it in the body of the email.)

A few rules:

1. The recipe must be your original work. If it’s a modification or derivative of an existing recipe, you need to state that in the post. Any images must be your original work.

2. Submitting the recipe to the contest constitutes permission for us to republish it at Cookthink.com. The featured recipes we publish will be attributed to their source with a link. We reserve the right to (lightly) edit the recipe to make it conform to our style guidelines. We also reserve the right to use one of our stock images with the recipe.

3. Submit as often as you like.

The subject for the first root source challenge is flat-leaf parsley! The person who submits the featured recipe will receive a copy of Jeanne Kelley’s beautiful Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes: Recipes from a Modern Kitchen Garden. Submissions are due by 12 noon EST, Tuesday, February 19th.

Send off your flat-leaf parsley recipes to rootsourcechallenge [at] cookthink [dot] com. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you’re not a root source subscriber, you can sign up here. If you’d like to blog about the Root Source Challenge, you can find logos here and here.

*Special thanks to The Lisa Ekus Group for donating cookbooks for the Root Source Challenge.

Editor’s note: Since August, Kristin Hohenadel has been writing and editing for the Cookthink reference section. Beginning today, Kristin will also become a regular contributor to the Cookthink blog. Based in France, Kristin is the European correspondent for Apartment Therapy and the Paris city editor for Gridskipper. Her work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue and Gourmet.

I went to a new dentist recently and during our little get-to-know-you session (conducted by the doctor himself, who also answers his own phone, with or without a drill in his hand; books his own appointments; walks you to the door; and takes the money right from your very hand) he asked for my profession. “Why?” I asked. “It’s for my statistics,” he said, looking up from his computer (he was typing in answers with a single finger). “To calculate which professions have the worst teeth.”

Journalists, it turns out, have pretty decent dental hygiene, though they are known to cancel appointments at the 11th hour to be whisked off on out-of-town assignments, and sometimes let their check-ups lapse. So who had the worst teeth?

“Bakers!” he said.

I suddenly had a vision of my old friend Hubert, a cute boulanger with a mouthful of rotten teeth at the ripe old age of 34. He’d been working as a baker since an apprenticeship at 14 in his native Cannes, and years of living without health insurance as an otherwise successful expat baker in Los Angeles hadn’t allowed him to acquire a set of American pearly whites.

It turns out that French bakers have the worst teeth because they breathe in flour dust all day, the sugars of which get between the teeth and gums and cause cavities galore. Flour is also the leading cause of on-the-job asthma in France; one in four patients declaring a respiratory illness are bakers by profession.

The national boulangerie association is trying to come up with preventive measures to protect the health of the nation’s bakers. Those measures include teaching them how to reduce the amount of flour dust they inhale by modifying their gestures — from emptying flour sacks to cleaning up countertops — that they didn’t learn in cooking school.

Ethicurean’s been following the recent legislative jujitsu in California surrounding raw milk. After what was thought to be a successful fight against a “sneaky amendment to the California code that would likely have put the state’s two raw-milk suppliers out of business,” the pro-raw milk (or at least not anti-raw milk) bill was sidelined so that a blue ribbon committee could be set up to look into the issue further.

The movement for greater accessibility to raw milk is a battle near and dear to my cheesemaker heart. If you’re not familiar with the raw milk movement, start your research at Real Milk and with Raw USA’s comparison chart of milk production practices.

Related: What’s happening in your state with raw milk? (Real Milk)
Related: Bid in Assembly to repeal tough new raw milk standard? (SF Chronicle)
Related: Got raw milk? Be very quiet (Time)
Related: The udder truth (Salon)

Rum warms you up from the inside out. It also adds a warm note to any number of sweet or savory dishes. Check out, for example, hogwash’s Banana Hazelnut Upside-Down Cake or our Braised Pork Chops With Rum, Mushrooms, Cream And Basil. To see more of the drink’s mixed history (as well as some mixed drinks), read this week’s root source on dark rum. If you haven’t already, subscribe today.

For more fun with rum, take a look at some of these recipes:

Recipe: Cubes à la Noisette (Chocolate & Zucchini)
Recipe: French Chocolate Brownies (Serious Eats)
Recipe: Dark And Stormy Rum Balls (hogwash)
Recipe: Cocktail: The ‘Dark and Stormy’ (Serious Eats)
Recipe: Honey, Pistachio and Rum Palmiers (Pro Bono Bakers)

It’s far enough into winter that I’m not as into rich hearty soups and stews as I was when the weather first turned cold. And even though it’s still January, the days are getting longer. February’s only a few days away, and March is a countdown.

Today at the store I picked up a zucchini — the best-looking out-of-season vegetable I saw — to work into a summery pasta for lunch. I like to throw a few beans into pasta whenever I can to make a complete protein, so I grabbed a can of white beans, too. At home in the fridge I had a few leftover whole peeled tomatoes, some fresh mozzarella and a bundle of mint.

I boiled water for the pasta, seasoned it with a tablespoon of kosher salt, and tossed in a handful of farfalle. Meanwhile, I heated a tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil was hot and shimmering I added the zucchini. I sprinkled the zucchini lightly with salt and pepper, then didn’t touch them for a full 2 minutes so they would brown.

I thinly sliced a couple of garlic gloves, rinsed and drained a can of white beans and diced two peeled tomatoes. I added the garlic to the pan with the zucchini and stirred. After about 15 seconds I added the tomatoes, a handful of the white beans and a spoonful of the pasta cooking liquid.

When the pasta was al dente, I drained it and tossed it in the skillet with the zucchini mixture. I diced a ball of fresh mozzarella and thinly sliced about 5 mint leaves, then added them both to the pasta, which I stirred until the mozzarella turned soft, about 2 minutes. It was a good dose of summer in January.

Reference: How to prep mint (Cookthink)
Reference: What does al dente mean? (Cookthink)
Reference: How to slice a zucchini (Cookthink)

If you’re coming here from Lifehacker or del.icio.us and you’re a newcomer to Cookthink, you may have missed our post a couple of weeks ago about the Cookthinktank, a new project we’ve undertaken with a handful of cookbook authors and food bloggers.

We’re really excited to be working with Barbara Kafka, Coconut & Lime, hogwash, Rasa Malaysia, Steamy Kitchen and VeganYumYum. (Read our original post on the Cookthinktank.) Just a quick note here to say that we’re adding more recipes every day and are looking forward to announcing some new Cookthinktankers soon!

In the meantime, try these Minced Chicken And Pork Rolls from Rasa Malaysia. We made them two nights ago, and they’re all that.

Browse: Barbara Kafka recipes
Browse: Coconut & Lime recipes
Browse: hogwash recipes
Browse: Rasa Malaysia recipes
Browse: Steamy Kitchen recipes
Browse: VeganYumYum recipes

When I came to work for Cookthink, I assumed that I would continue to pursue music writing on the side. But I find more and more that the subjects cross over, that my love of music inspires my cooking and, occasionally, my love of food inspires my music. Apparently I am not alone.

Greta Gertler and The Extroverts put out an album called “Edible Restaurant,” and I ended up writing up the song “Veselka” for today’s NPR Song of the Day (head over there to listen).

Veselka is an actual restaurant, located on 9th St. and 2nd Ave. in Manhattan’s East Village. Something about Greta’s description of the comforting foods served there really captured me:

“I used to go there on my own a lot / or with my close girlfriends / Over coffee and pierogi / our hearts began to mend.”

I have mended hearts over steaming plates from local haunts before, and those favorite places have an ability to center us in our busy lives, creating familiar faces in seas of strangers. This album is quirky and sweetly sentimental (with the added bonus of a tuba). I highly recommend you take a listen.

(Image courtesy of veselka.com)

We love our slaws and grated vegetable salads around here. In today’s Minimalist column, Bittman suggests salting raw cabbage for an hour or two to draw out some moisture, soften the texture and concentrate the flavor.

I don’t mind the texture of raw cabbage, so I’ve never thought about salting it. In his recipe for cabbage and carrot salad, Bittman suggests using at least 1 teaspoon to start on a head and a half of cabbage. You want to use “enough so that leaves exude moisture within 10 or 15 minutes,” he writes. “If they do not, add a little more salt. Let sit an hour or two, pressing out moisture out with your hands once or twice.”

Anybody in the habit of salting your cabbage?