I spent the day on Sunday getting caught up and then writing plant notes. I found a couple gardens that had no notes at all, so I went to my photos (which are, of course, all organized by year and garden) and was able to fill in some info for those gardens. But then I thought, why not for all of them. It’s more fun looking at the pictures than just transcribing barely legible scribble. So I finished the section out that way and on Monday I will go back and do the first gardens also.
After lunch the thumbtacks to hold the shelf liners arrived and by 2PM I was sick of transcription, so I collected my implements of destruction and headed down to the old root cellar.
Well, these shelves have been up for a couple decades and the plywood has hardened. The liner was so stiff I had to put a tack about every 4” or so. These liners were made for the wire shelves and have tabs cut out on both sides to clip to the wire. These would catch on the underside of the boxes, so I thumbtacked them closed.
I managed to get 2 shelves done before my fingers went numb from pushing tacks enough so I could hammer them in. But tacks don’t like old plywood…
My brother had been down to stay with my mom this weekend and he got home mid afternoon. He’d been adamant he wanted to make parsnip chowder from some of my parsnips. So we collected ingredients. We had to make a few changes to the recipe due to food intolerances.
This is the recipe my brother had. He’d saved this clipping since it was published in March 2016 in the local paper.
We deleted the potatoes in favor of more parsnips. The 6 cups of liquid were changed to:
3 cups of my chicken bone stock
1 cup of milk, but coconut milk
1 cup of raw cream
We left out the flour and butter as it didn’t need thickener. He used less parsley, only ⅛ cup, and much more bacon.
We had to core the parsnips as we’d opted to use the huge ones for the chowder, as they would be cooked to mush. He saved about ⅓ of the parsnips to add later so they would retain their shape.
As I took the above photos, I said to him, betcha I forget to get a finished photo of the chowder before it’s all gone. Well… sigh…
I did find a photo amazingly like what we’d made and even more amazing, the recipe was similar too!
It came from the 1977 New York Times New England Heritage Cookbook. My brother was curious about the title on the bottom, so I ordered the cookbook from the library.
The person who made the chowder in the bowl didn’t use chicken broth and added cream. Hers is just like ours except we had parsley specks.
Tom was here as he was checking out what the truck’s problem was. The manual choke had ceased to work at all and he fixed that. We knew the fuel filter needed changed, so he had brought a new one. Between those 2 things, the truck was much happier.
We have major threats of a nor’easter coming on Tuesday, so he needed to have the truck in good shape.
We tried to get him to eat some chowder, but he’d just take a small sample. The chowder was excellent. The chicken stock had added a lot of body to it and the cup of cream made it like velvet. And one can never have too much bacon! We’d used the herb bacon we’d made when we had pigs.
There’s no shortage of parsnips, so I hope we have this again soon!
We did find that although the new root cellar has 80% humidity, the parsnips had started to wither. So I will have to get them out and into my special made bags and into the fridge drawers real soon.
The time change wrecked havoc on my heating schedule (and sleep) as I didn’t want to stay up late to light the stoves. But it’s the last time it will change, so I will just have to figure it out.
Monday is laundry and writing more plant notes. I might try to bang in a couple more shelves worth of thumbtacks too.