Roasted Parsnips

I found two recipes for roasted parsnips and ended up combining them into one:

Roasted Parsnips with Mint and Sage from Allrecipes.com and

Roasted Parsnips and Carrots and from the Food Network website.

I mostly liked the first recipe, but I wasn't sure how I felt about the mint and sage flavors.  Also, I didn't have the honey it called for.  So I kept looking and found the second recipe which used dill and no honey.  That was great, but it called for 1-inch-thick slices of parsnip instead of sticks like the first one, which was more what I was picturing in my mind.  Plus it wanted you to "toss occasionally" which was more work than just sticking the pan in the oven.

Here's what I ended up doing.  It's basically the first recipe with dill minus the honey, mint, or sage.

Ingredients:
2 Parsnips
2 Carrots
1 TB olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 tsp salt
black pepper to taste
dried dill to sprinkle on top

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

2. Cut parsnips and carrots into large sticks.  Place in mixing bowl, toss with olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper.

3. Toss until evenly coated and spread evenly on baking sheet, so sticks are not touching.

4. Bake until tender, about 30 minutes.

5. Sprinkle with dill and serve hot.

I really liked this.  I only cooked mine for 20 minutes but they could have used the full 30.  I've done this twice so far, once with parsnips and carrots, once just with parsnips.  I think I prefer it with carrots because it gives you a break from the strong parsnip flavor.

Since then we received parsnips for several more weeks.  We also made these recipes from Martha Stewart's webiste:

Mashed Parsnips and Potatoes

Apple-Parsnip Mash

Both turned out very well and were a nice way to use up the parsnips!

Beginnings

I am Victoria, and my husband is Rob. This blog exists because we are really good at planning, but we’re terrible at planning meals. It’s so bad that we had to pay people to bring vegetables to us just so we wouldn’t eat sloppy joes every night. Our weekly box of random vegetables makes an excellent Google search (“what do I do with swiss chard, parsnips, potatoes and an avocado?”), and so you, oh Internet, have become our meal planner. It’s great, and we want to share with you what we’ve done with your wisdom.

This blog is a record of how we put together meals from what we receive each week.  It's not a step-by-step "how to cook" blog nor a collection of recipes, although I do hope to provide links for the recipes I find online.  Instead, it is an archive of ideas and inspiration for how to eat beets and potatoes three weeks in a row without getting bored.  (We just signed up for the delivery service in November, so it's been nothing but root vegetables so far!)  It is also an archive of the tweaks I make to the recipes I do find.  Often I have an idea in mind, but can't find a recipe to match.  I'll usually find several recipes that are almost, but not quite, what I'm looking for.  Then I'll take bits and pieces from each one and mash them together to accomplish my vision. I’ve never had a record of what I did to repeat it in the future…until now!  I hope this blog will provide inspiration for many meals to come.

Part of the motivation for signing up for a produce delivery service was to force us to eat more fruits and veggies as well as force us to be more creative in the meals we make.  We hope this leads to healthier eating habits as well as eating at home more often - because we LOVE to eat out!  

Speaking of eating out, we thought we'd also occasionally include our restaurant critiques.  When we try a new place, we like to rate it on a 5-star system in 3 categories: food, service, and ambiance.  There are so many great restaurants in the Portland, OR area, we'll never run out of new places to try!