The Wiki article called them "swedes", which is just another name for rutabagas. They certainly are hard to skin, the trick is to cut the rind off with a sharp knife, don't try to peel it like an apple. Don't be afraid to cut off some of the good part with the rind, kind of like you would do with a pumpkin or squash.
When the papermill was on strike back in '73 a friend of mine offered me a healthy share of the produce if I would help him bring in the final harvest from his garden. It was a really big garden. Part of my share was a hundred pound feed sack full of rutabagas. It took us a couple of months, but we ate them all, or so I had thought. When the snow melted in the spring I noticed this big old rutabaga on top of the ground out behind the house. After some interrogation, my hypothetical wife confessed that she had pitched the last one out the back door because she was tired of cleaning them, cooking them, and eating them. There it sat, covered with snow until the spring thaw revealed its presence. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, so we cooked it up and ate it. To our surprise, it tasted way better than all the other ones we had eaten.
I found out later that you're supposed to freeze rutabagas before you cook them. Indeed, the old timers used to just leave their rutabagas in the garden and dig them out of the snow as needed. I seem to remember that you could do the same thing with cabbages, but I'm not sure if they would last all winter. I know that deer like sugar beets better after they have been frozen but, if they freeze and thaw several times, they turn to mush. That won't happen if they get well buried in snow after they freeze the first time and stay that way until the deer discover them.
This just in:
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