MindSpinner

I had never eaten a parsnip, nor indeed taken a good look at one until just the other day. As a child, I misspelled the word once a long time ago in a spelling bee down South; the woman who read the word ladeled it out as “paahshnip.” My California-trained ears were then no match for a Georgia drawl. But this past week I was looking into vegetables that, with a little protection, can be grown through the winter, and parsnips are among these. The parsnip was a staple in European diets, I read, before the potato supplanted it. It sounded like a vegetable that needed to be given a second chance. So when I saw parsnips at the grocery store a few afternoons ago in the produce section, I picked out two of the fresher looking ones. Most were a bit rubbery. They looked like long, tan carrots with little root hairs here and there. At home I cut the smaller one up, cooked it with an onion and a bit of sugar, salt, pepper, and basil, and gave it a try. It tasted as if (sugar, onion, and basil aside) one could distill paint thinner from it. Ugh. Little wonder the potato replaced it. I ate all the yummy buttery onion bits off the plate and left the parsnip slices. Then I cut up the second parsnip, collected peelings and cooked bits, and fed the lot to the compost bin. Being able to feed stuff to the compost bin happily disguises waste as investment and assuages parsnip guilt.