As I crunched my way through the entire bag, it occurred to me that these salty and slightly sweet chips would be a welcome bit of crunch crumbled on top of a creamy parsnip soup. Luckily I had the foresight to buy two bags. I found a forgotten jar of yellow split peas in the cupboard and decided to use them as the soup base.
After shooting all day, the last thing I want to do it eat is whatever I have been photographing. I have usually plated it 3-4 different ways, transferred it from bowl to plate to mug to see what looks better and by the time I am finished, I never want to see that food again. Depending on what it is, I will either deliver it to a friend, send it off to my husband’s office or wrap it up and stick it in the freezer.
The recipe for this soup makes a big pot so it’s perfect for freezing, and pulling out on those nights when you just can’t face cooking. Parsnips are an under-utilized vegetable. I love them roasted but they make a stellar soup ingredient. They have an mild spice flavour, reminiscent of nutmeg and cinnamon.
Start by sautéing the all-powerful culinary trio of onions, carrots and celery and add a heaping pile of diced parsnips. Ground cumin and smoked paprika really complement the slightly earthy flavour of parsnips.
Packed with fibre and protein, yellow split peas will make a healthy counterbalance to the parsnip chip garnish!
Vegetable stock was my liquid of choice.
Every summer we plant an herb garden outside our kitchen door. Before we can even finish washing the dirt off our hands, the rabbits, voles, squirrels, moles and other assorted wildlife in our backyard have munched off the tops of the cilantro, basil and Italian parsley plants! For some reason, they shun the rosemary.
By fall, our rosemary plants are tall, healthy and quite lovely. We pot them and bring them inside to live on the kitchen windowsill for the winter. My husband has a wonderful green thumb and takes care of all the living things in our home. Each week, as he goes about his watering ritual he asks me the same question, “Are these rosemary plants still alive?’
I have to explain here that he is colour blind and has a great deal of trouble telling the difference between greens, browns and grays. So while I see a vibrant silvery green rosemary plant, he does not. Each week I smile and patiently answer, “Yes, dear, they are alive and well.” Okay, maybe I am not being completely honest here. Perhaps every other week I smile and give a patient answer. On alternate weeks, I am quite likely to give a snarky sarcastic retort, muttered under my breath, which I will not print here.
I must admit that this weekly discourse has given me some pause for thought. If my husband has trouble seeing shades of grey, I worry that I should die in my sleep, he may not notice the grey pallor of my skin in the morning. It may be days before he notices that I am not alive.
There has been quite a bit of buzz (well in the culinary world at least), about New York Times food columnist Melissa Clark’s new cookbook, Cook This Now. My kitchen shelves are bulging with cookbooks and I resolved not to buy anymore, but I did order one to give as a gift to my sister. When it arrived, of course I had to look through it. Melissa organizes the book by month, which ordinarily irritates me. My husband can provide anyone interested with the entire litany of little things that irritate me, but let’s keep it pleasant and not go there today. As I was saying, ordinarily, I prefer when cookbooks are organized by traditional categories (ie: appetizers, breads, chicken etc…) However, Melissa had me hooked from the very first January recipe, “White Bean Stew with Rosemary, Garlic and Farro.” She had me at farro!
So of course, I kept the cookbook for myself and ordered another one for my sister, plus a bonus book (Momofuko’s Milk Bar) as my penalty for being late. Bo, if you’re reading this, now you know why your gift was late.
And rebel that am, I skipped right past the first 2 January recipes and boldly tackled the 3rd one first! Full disclosure here, I’m really not that much of a rebel, I just happened to have a whole chicken defrosting in the fridge.
Melissa likes to play a game when she looks through food magazines. She doesn’t read the recipes. Instead, she looks at the photos and imagines what she thinks the recipe should be. She says that her track record is pretty good at guessing accurately, but sometimes she’s way off base. And that’s how the recipe for crisp Roasted Chicken with Chickpeas, Lemons and Carrots was born. Melissa explains:
“The photo was of a roasted chicken on a bed of chickpeas and what I thought were tiny cubes of carrot. I could taste the dish in my head. The chickpeas were crunchy and salty next to the melting, sweet carrots and everything was suffused with chicken fat from the roasting bird.
In fact, the carrots turned out to be bits of orange bell pepper (definitely not in season in January in New York) and the chickpeas were added to the pan during the last few minutes of cooking so they would stay moist and soft, without the time to absorb much in the way of chicken essence. I’m sure it was a perfectly good dish. But I liked my own idea better.”
Her description was very persuasive. I set to work right away. Lemons are sliced into little wedges and then mixed with chickpeas and garam masala, an Indian spice blend. I happened to have rainbow carrots and some parsnips, so they got thrown into the pan as well.
More garam masala is rubbed all over the chicken and then the chicken is seasoned with salt and pepper and then stuffed with more lemon and some fresh thyme. Melissa suggests rubbing the chicken with softened butter, but I left this step out as I didn’t want the extra fat. The stuffed chicken is placed on a rack, above the carrots and parsnips and roasted in a 400° F oven for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, the chickpea-lemon mixture is added to the bottom of the pan and the chicken gets about another hour in the oven. While it was roasting I prepared the gremolata garnish.
This dish is pure roast chicken goodness! Moist and succulent and intensely flavourful.The carrots and parsnips turned dark brown and had a wonderful sweet caramelized flavour. The chickpeas turned all crispy from roasting in the chicken juices. The only part of the dish we didn’t love was the roasted lemons. Melissa says they are edible, but we found them to be too bitter. Next time, and there will be a next time very soon, I will add only the zest of the lemons to the chickpeas.
If I’m being completely honest, I need to tell you that this soup was inspired by a bag of parsnip chips from Trader Joe’s!
Parsnips are an under-utilized vegetable. I love them roasted but they make a stellar soup ingredient. They have an mild spice flavour, reminiscent of nutmeg and cinnamon.
Ground cumin and smoked paprika really complement the slightly earthy flavour of parsnips.
