If Life Gives You Parsnips

We belong to a CSA that supplies us with vegetables. During the winter in Northwest Pennsylvania, aside from a few greens raised in hydroponic greenhouses, we receive more root vegetables than any family of any size could possible process. We have eaten curried sweet potato stews, baked potatoes, cabbage and kohlrabi slaws with Asian dressings, and carrot soups. Parsnips, however, bedevil me. They aren't bad roasted and there are some interesting parsnip stews and soups, but I have been having a difficult time keeping up with new shipments.

So I boiled up a bunch, milled some fresh whole wheat, used my whole wheat sourdough starter that comes from the Cripple Creek gold rush of 1893, and out of my oven came some of the most beautifully formed breads I have seen in quite a while. The interior was moist, but not gummy in the least, the crust was firm, and the aroma was naturally sweet with a hint of the growing season now just a distant memory. I'd share the recipe, but I'm afraid I just made it up as I went along.