On Monday we pulled the last of our carrots and parsnips. It was a lot of fun, and took less than an hour, and then there they were in boxes in our garage. So far so good.
Of course, the most time consuming part of any harvest is not the harvesting, but the preparation or preservation of the food that was harvested.
In the case of parsnips and carrots, usually the way we use them is in soups. We like to blanche and freeze about two cups of carrots and two cups of parsnips together, which makes a perfect addition to almost any soup, and a critical component of Kathleen’s world famous minestrone.
But by Monday night Evie had a sore throat and a mild fever, and yesterday morning she was down for the count. Kathleen didn’t feel good either, and had to take a sick day from work. So the women folk stayed in their jammies most of the day. Evie did school between naps and eventually got through all of it, but was not really able to help with all of the fun that was about to transpire…
First we had to wash all the parsnips and carrots. Daddy and Seppi did this outside, despite the near freezing temperatures, because we didn’t want to fill the kitchen sinks with dirt and leaves.
Seppi guarded the process from bears, coyotes and bad guys with his sister’s pirate pistol, which he has adopted as his own personal EDC piece.
Then after the parsnips we had all of the carrots to clean. Seppi took off his coat and dropped it somewhere random… as usual.
Eventually, Daddy got smart enough to put the whole operation on the tail gate of the pickup truck so that he didn’t have to bend over or squat the whole time.
Once inside we had to peel all of those parsnips and carrots. Seppi was very good at this, for a three-year-old.
Ellie also turned out to be an expert carrot peeler, and peeled 4 or 5 dozen of them by herself!
Meanwhile, Daddy was busy dicing them all. We dice a parsnip, then a carrot, then a parsnip, then a carrot, and so on and so forth, until we ran out of parsnips.
By noon Mommy was feeling better, or at least, well enough to stand up. She took the parsnip carrot mixture and put them into a colander, holding roughly two quarts at a time. She submerged each batch in boiling water for 90 seconds to blanch them (this stops the natural breakdown process of a vegetable so they hold color and flavor better when frozen.)
Then each batch was submerged in ice water until cool, then vacuum packed one quart at a time.
After all the parsnip/carrot mix bags were done we still had a whole sink-load of carrots.
Mommy started feeling badly again, and Seppi and Winnie began melting down, and Ellie was just done with it so…
We called it quits with 21 quarts of parsnips/carrots and 4 quarts of carrots by themselves.
The rest of the carrots are peeled, but not diced, sitting in a bowl of water on the back deck. They will stay nice and cool there (hopefull they won’t freeze) until after Thanksgiving when we will figure out what to do with them. Maybe can some carrot soup?
Little Farm in the Big City 