In thinking of honey and mustard, it occured to me to use the parsnips. There were not enough potatoes for my boys' voracious appetite, so I thought I would use the parsnips too. There is a subtle sweetness to parsnips that I thought could work with the other parts of the meal. Since the boys were not so keen on mash I thought it was pushing things too far to

I often wonder what was cooked in the middle ages before the potato had arrived from North America. I am aware that parsnips did feature more strongly then and have known that parsnips can be roasted or mashed in a way analagous to potatoes. Since my childhood I have had roast parsnips which are roasted in a similar manner to roast potatoes. However I have also been aware of differences. It is not just that the parsnip is shaped more like a carrot than a potato, but it is more fibrous.

Some months ago I tried deep frying slices of parsnip (about 1 cm thick). I assumed that since roast parsnips take roughly half the time of roast potatoes in the oven that the fried slices would fry quickly. I was wrong, the parsnip slices were nice and golden but undercooked. Their properties are a bit different from spuds and I will need more practice before I have mastered them as an ingredient.

The Humble Spud recommends parboiling potatoes for Rösti so I parboiled the parsnips for 10 minutes. I then grated them with my MagiMix using the coarse wheel. The result looked coarser than normal Rösti but there was not an obvious way to make it finer. I finely chopped a small onion and fried it and added it to the grated parsnip. I then tried to pat together the mix into cakes and then fried them. Unfortunately they all fell apart in the frying pan a bit like my stovie disaster. I fried them a bit longer but then had to serve as my boys needed to go out.

Taste was not terrible, but again the parsnips were a bit undercooked....and the result certainly could not be described as Rösti as they had fallen apart. I am not sure if next time I need to do more parboiling or whether I should abandon the Rösti idea and simply bind the mix with an egg. That would certainly not fall apart.

So one success, this experiment failed but might be worth retrying. One more to go...