Who are Stag and Turnip?
Stag and Turnip are writers who also happen to have been best friends since the time they got arrested. They were fourteen, living in small-town Ontario, trying to carve a short cut to the local fast-food joint. $75.50 each in trespassing fines, a court appearance, and a couple of decades later, they still hang out, challenge the authorities, and chase down their passion about food.
Stag’s early food memories were formed by her family’s 2-year stint in the Philippines, where typical fare included goat, fish, fried bananas, and fresh mangoes. And, and at the farewell dinner: her cherished dog (or so she was told). She trudged through the rest of her early life in Canada on bland English meat n’ potato fare but was awakened by hot sauce in her early 20s on a trip to Mississippi, and has been in search of delicious ever since.
Currently she uses her job as a thin excuse to travel around the world and taste all manner of animals, plants, and minerals. She resides in Toronto around the corner from Turnip, and is starting her first for-real vegetable garden this summer.
Turnip will eat most anything. Growing up it was mostly co-op lentils, alfalfa, and carob, so at her freshman dorm cafeteria she began every meal with three or four Rice Crispie squares and a glass of Coke. Since then it’s been a slow march back towards balance. These days the Turnip dining table will see, over a typical week: oatmeal, roast chicken & potatoes, sticker books, oatmeal, math homework, over-easy eggs & toast, Ramona the Pest, cut veggies & dip (with tortellini on the side), Nintendo DS, the sewing machine, oatmeal, delivery pizza boxes, Play Doh, laptop, curried lamb & rice, stacks of graded and ungraded midterms, take-out Chinese, oatmeal, and grilled cheese. This rotation seems to keep everyone relatively hale and happy, despite the odd pencil shaving in the soup.
