14 November 2006

Parsnip Chips! 2

I was at Whole Foods last night on my way home to the Festival of Sitting on the Sofa and I was looking for some chips to have with dinner. Now as we all know, Whole Foods is as likely to carry Fritos or Lays or whatever as they are to carry real Pop-Tarts, i.e., not at all. I think that Whole Foods believes that junk food can be good for you, which - in my own opinion - completely defeats the purpose of it being junk food.

Anyway, I was going to get some kind of healthy Terra Chips kind of thing when what to my wondering eyes should appear but Parsnips Chips! For real! They have taken the sort of vegetable that only about three dozen people in the world (including me) willingly eat and have tried to turn it into a snack food. I'd post a link to them except that as far as I can tell, Whole Foods is ashamed of them, so I couldn't find any links.

Naturally, I bought them. Things that make me laugh at the store should be puchased and taken home (and blogged about while I'm in my pajamas). Parsnip chips are more like banana chips than they are like potato chips. They *might* have been fried, but they seem more dried. (In fact, they remind me of the horrors that my mother performed on innocent fruits and vegetables with her food dehydrator, except that they are parsnip chips and therefore hilarious instead of being desiccated tomatoes and therefore tragic.) They tasted just fine, far better in fact than the punishment cookies that Whole Foods sells that I mistakenly purchased a couple of years ago.

Being thicker than potato chips, they hold their shapes better which makes them better cat toys. For some reason, Pekoe is completely, passionatetly, insanely bonkers for Cheetos and will go to any measures to get them if I have them in the house. Which means, of course, that I very rarely have them in the house because I don't actually wished to be mugged by a 12-pound cat. When he saw the bag of Parsnip Chips I could seem the wheels start to turn as he made the connection that if these came in the same sort of bag as Cheetos, they might be Cheetos or nearly enough like Cheetos, but at any rate, he wanted one. I eventually gave him a small one and he batted it around for a while and smelled it a lot and was very disappointed in its lack of Cheetosity, which means that I can eat Parsnips Chips in relative peace.

After you get used to the fact that they are to chips what carob is to chocolate (i.e., nothing at all like), they aren't bad. They're more crunchy than crispy and I'll admit that a large part of the fun is just being amused that they are made from parsnips, but as healthy snacks go, they aren't bad.

I'll probably have to give Brett a nice, large bag of them some time real soon. I'm sure his comments will be very educational.

4 comments:

Brett said...

I was going to wait until Parsnip Chips! 4 before commenting, but what the hey. Yes I can indeed think of many uses for Parsnip Chips. In these sensitive times they might make a fine feather substitute for a traditional Tar and Parsnip Chipping before someone is run out of town an a rail for trying to poison a friend with mutant mindbending 'snacks'. Just a hypothetical example mind you.

Maureen said...

I discovered parsnips as a wonderful soup ingredient during my last overseas tour. I was SO upset to see how expensive they are here! Wonder if Parsnip Chips would work in soup... :D

Leta said...

I'm not sure that they'd hold up well if cooked into the soup, but they'd be lovely crumbled on top right before serving. And it seems that even Terra Chips (the maker) is ashamed of them, as they aren't on *their* website either.

tommyspoon said...

Whenever someone says parsnips, I always think of this.