What Can I Do with Parsnips: Roasted Parsnip Chips

Cheap Eat Challenge, Part 2: Watch as our family of 6 eats on less than $10/day.

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You know I try to title my posts so as to draw traffic to them--in other words I try to use words people would use or ask questions people might ask in an online search. But what I really wanted to title this post was "Parsnips, What the Heck" or "The Ugly Parsnip Solution" or "Alien Parsnips from Outer Space and How to Eat Them." One of these days I'm going to throw caution to the wind. Especially where parsnips are concerned.

These are parsnips. Correction: These are parsnips grown in my garden, which apparently has some soil deficiencies. Or a slightly wicked sense of humor.

I didn't grow many this year. Correction, I grew more, but for whatever reason the ones in the pots with the good soil did lousy and got crowded out by their more attractive carrot brothers. I hear that this is the way with more attractive brothers. But I wouldn't know because my brothers are both equally attractive.

Because of my small yield I couldn't make the soup that converted me to parsnips.

And I knew I had to do something with them, because I could tell that they were plotting to take over the world if I didn't act fast.

So I used a recipe from Pioneer Woman called Roasted Root Vegetable "Candy" which, considering the appearance of my parsnips, sounded too full of promise to be true.

I cleaned my parsnips:

Then peeled and diced them with some clearly more handsome carrots.

Taking special care, of course, to make sure all my photographs were taken in the dim florescent light of my night time kitchen.

Then I coated them with olive oil and sprinkled a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper just as instructed. I threw them on a cookie sheet to bake at 375 for 30-40 minutes. And they did.

They still didn't look promising. And the taste of the raw parsnips had been even less than promising. Even the smell as they'd roasted hadn't been anything to sing about. And as if that wasn't so darn enough, I got some a little too roasted--so that they kind of hardened a bit in a chip like way.  This is gross when it happens to your oven roasted potatoes.

But. And yeah, it's like the biggest but ever--you should totally allow this to happen to your parsnips. Because they were so fan-freakin-tastic I still can't believe it. The roasted ones were amazing. And the slightly over roasted ones were just super amazing. I put them all in for five more minutes just to go for more over cooking.

I let them cool a bit (as Pioneer Woman instructs) and they were just delicious. I mean just so amazing. It's like all the weird alien brains got cooked out and just left a sweet delicious weird looking whitish chip.

Moral of the story: Make these. Overcook them a wee bit if you can (and dice them in rounds so they're sort of chip like). Then go to the store and buy more parsnips so you can do it again. Here's the link again.