For the love of parsnips

We are just starting to harvest our parsnips now that we've had a couple of freezes.  The freezing helps create more sugars so the parsnips are deliciously sweet.  I harvested a bucketful this morning and used them in Mollie Katzen's gypsy soup, one of our most favorite soup recipes.  I replaced the called for sweet potato/winter squash with the parsnips since they are equally sweet and very like a sweet potato in texture.  The parnsips put out some seriously long roots so hand pulling proved a bit challenging this morning, but as long as I pulled very close to the root, it eventually came out.  I peeled the parsnips just like carrots and voila - a perfectly sweet delicious root vegetable that's loaded with vitamin C, fiber, folic acid and many other healthful vitamins and minerals.

We still have a few bowl fulls of fresh tomatoes that made a perfect addition to the soup.  I used up the last of our fresh sweet peppers so we will now start using our frozen.  It's lovely here today and more garden cleanup is on the agenda with a nice hot bowl of soup to follow.  Perfect.