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Yesterday I spun round and round the organic greens at Whole Foods a few times before I finally wheeled my little basket-carrying minicart up to a large, unhappy looking gentleman in an apron and swallowed my pride.

“Hi, uh… Ha ha. I need a…parsnip? Except, I have no idea what a parsnip is.”

It’s really a rather unremarkable thing, now that I’ve seen it. You’d think it’d be…fancier…with a name like “parsnip,” have some color or some leaves or an interesting shape or something. But no. It’s about the boringest of roots since the potato, though it does smell very nice once you start to cut it.

Now fennel, ironically, sounds boring as hell, and yet it looks like it just landed from outer space. Lucky for me, it had a big plastic sign that said “FENNEL” in front of it, but that didn’t stop me from confirming its general characteristics on the phone with my mother. I wasn’t quite sure which Naked Chef recipe I was going to attempt last night, but a few more minutes of contemplating the geometric oddity that is fennel really tipped the scales toward the parsnip. Pancetta and parsnips on linguine it is. (I got the fennel anyway, just in case. The recipe combining it with spicy salami and tomato sauce just seems too tempting, but I’ll have to wait till there’s time for abject failure.)

“One parsnip, cut in half and sliced thinly.” I love Jamie Oliver’s cooking, and his winging-it style of measurement is fine and dandy on the TV box when you can see what he’s doing, but half-assed language like that in a book is just an invitation to disaster. Cut in half how? This is not a symmetric vegetable, you’ve got to specify an axis, damnit. Am I cutting this thing L-T or T-L? (Little fracture toughness humor there. Very little.) Sliced thinly, like cheese? That certainly won’t work with the noodles! I peered intently at the pretty picture in the book and could discern no large slices of parsnip; the little crispy-looking wisps of something light made me think I should julienne the parsnip. So say parsnip julienned, damnit, Jamie! I mean, “two good glugs of olive oil” is one thing, but the mechanics of slicing requires a little specificity. And now, I’m telling you: julienne your parsnip, but after you’ve cut it in half across its length - you don’t want tremendously long strips. See, how hard was that, Naked guy?

Julienne a half-lengthed parsnip and set it aside. Take six or seven slices of pancetta and chop it up pretty good. Sprinkle your pancetta with the leaves from as many stems of fresh thyme (in retrospect I wish I’d have bruised them first, so do that), and chuck that into a skillet with two Tbsp of butter. In 2-3 minutes, add your parsnips and a minced clove of garlic. Add 2 more pats of butter when it starts to simmer down. Meanwhile, be rolling out and cutting your fresh rosemary pasta, or opening your DiGiorno linguine because you don’t want to make your date drink a half a bottle of wine watching you fight with a pasta machine while she starves to death. If the former, curse and add two more pats of butter (MMM BUTTER) and turn the damn heat down on your parsnips before they go too crispy. (Incidentally, you definitely don’t want to cook this naked. Not with all that butter frying and popping.) Toss with your noodles and add plenty of fresh shredded parmesan. Jaime uses tagliatelle but my pasta machine don’t do that.

That’s seriously all there is too it, minus the swearing at the pasta dough. It’s really quite tasty, and you get to say “parsnip.” I’ll let you know about the fennel if it doesn’t kill me first.