More parsnip New Year treats

Amongst all the post-Christmas wilderness (partying, snowing and otherwise), here's a little bit of curiosity to amuse you.


My cockle-warming Parsnip and Parmezan soup has been a hit with a number of friends, and so whilst looking for another parsnip inspiring idea, I came across Elizabeth David's collection of Christmas recipes. One of them particularly caught my eye...

Pastenak and cress soupOr parsnip and cress soup - pastenak, according to David, is the medieval English word for parsnip , a corruption of the Latin word pastinaca. Now, the association I mentioned in my earlier soup post between the Russian word for parsnip - pasternak - and the famous Nobel-prize winner (yes, yes, Dr Zivago) doesn't seem all that laughable!

Did I completely confuse you? What I'm trying to say very pre New Year's Eve inarticulately, is that I just loved the feeling of discovering this little, unimportant linguistic link, which kind of felt fitting. In Italian the word is pastinache, in French panais - what is parsnip in your language??:):)

Back to the soup though...

To make the pastenak and cress soup you follow the same recipe as for my parsnip and parmezan soup, but omit the cheese and add a couple of handfuls of cress at the end, which makes the dish a whole lotta lighter and fresher. To me, this is a spring recipe really, so here's something that will work very nicely as your New Year's even starter - very a la Russe;)

Egg mayonnaise with parsnip cream
(taken from E. David's 'Christmas' edited by Jill Norman)

500 g parsnips, peeled or well scrubbed
3-4 tbsp of home-made mayonnaise (it needs to be rather acidic, so don't be shrewd with your lemon)
4-6 hard-boiled, organic, eggs
parsley

1. Chop parsnips into big chunks, bring to boil, simmer until cooked (some 20 mins), then puree and season with salt and plenty of pepper
2. Stir in your mayo, spread on a fanciful dish (I'd say a Soviet kitsch of a crystal dish in shape of a egg or a fish will work well here)
3. Cup eggs in half and arrange on top of the parsnip puree
4. Scatter shopped parsley

Nemirov honey coloured pepper vodka will work wonders here - match by taste, match by colour!

Thank you all my dear readers for a wonderfully food-laden year!

On warming those cockles

What a girl is to do when it is cold and wintery outside, when Christmas fever hasn't quite caught on yet and when her other, all important other half is away...

a soul-warming soup of course.

JC has left for the whole of December (a lucky thing will travel around Singapore and Thailand, but at least we will benefit from some lovely reportage from some bustling Asian food markets). And so I got to cooking - what else; a sweet and toothsome Parsnip and Parmezan soup.

You'll need:

a couple of large parsnips*
olive oil
Parmezan, grated
about 1.5 litres of stock, vegetable or chicken
Dukka (Middle-Eastern earthy spice of stone-ground wheat, sesame and other spice, can be bought from Arabica Food and Spice)

to garnish: parsley, good chunks of white bread and crispy bacon

roast the parsnip in a hot oven for about 30 minutes, sprinkle with Parmezan, and roast for another 5 minutes

transfer the vegetables into a saucepan, cover with hot stock, add a little salt and simmer for about 20-30 minutes

liquidise, sprinkle with dukka, parsley and bacon and serve in warmed bowls with cockle-warming chunks of bread.

I squeezed my eyes and imagined my dear JC in warm and humid urban forests of
Singapore - I hope the thought will warm his cockles too.

* did you know that a parsnip in Russian is pasternak, yes, that very author who gave us the drama of Dr Zivago? what an image I know:)