For the big night and cloudy morning, a special, Monday-edition, all-cocktail root source on clementines. (If you’re not a root source subscriber, sign up here.)

Happy New Year, everybody.

Over the past week, I’ve moved my home and office to a new spot. After cooking for four years on an electric cooktop in a small apartment, I feel lucky to graduate to a new gas range, a pro hood above it, and plenty of sturdy granite to hold it all together.

Today was my first lazy Sunday morning in the new place, and I wanted a homey, comforting breakfast. After a cup of coffee I walked over to Whole Foods (another perk) and picked up some turkey breakfast sausage, a dozen eggs and a pile of baby spinach.

When I got home, I preheated the oven to 350F. I heated a splash of olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, and browned the sausages on both sides. I slid the pan and sausages in the oven and cooked them until they were plump and hot all the way through, about 15 minutes.

I put the spinach and a splash of water in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. When the spinach began to wilt, I tossed it a few times with tongs, then covered the pan.

When the spinach had wilted most of the way down, I removed the lid so most of the liquid would evaporate. I seasoned the spinach with salt and pepper, and tossed it with a drizzle of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.

I scrambled the eggs in a little butter over medium heat, stirring them occasionally to form large, soft curds. When the eggs held together well but were still moist, I poured them onto a warm plate. I seasoned them with a sprinkling of red pepper flakes and a little salt, then dug in.

With tornado watches and thunderstorms all through central Alabama today, I’m craving something comforting and one-pottish for lunch. Back in September, we wrote in the Grüner Veltliner root source that this North African fish stew recipe was a nice segue between the seasons. It’s calling out to me now.

Any lunch suggestions for an eery, windless, white-sky day?

This penne with walnut pesto recipe is a template for any number of winter pestos. Over the weekend, the night before I left for Alabama for a week, I cleaned out the fridge and used arugula and basil as the green. For the nut, I scraped together a mix of almonds, walnuts and pecans. Pantry pesto. Plenty good.

Not a Christmas tradition at our house, but it may become one.

Recipe: Pan-Roasted Monkfish With Coconut Mashed Parnsips

The combination of the short days, the cold temperatures, my upcoming birthday, the holiday cards from friends I rarely see anymore, the family traditions, the gift-buying and the inundation of “the-year-that-was” stories makes it impossible not to think about my own year-that-was.

In thinking about how much I think about myself, it occurred to me that most of my concentrated self-reflection happens right now, at the very time I’m supposed to be thinking mostly of others.

Do you have this problem, too? If so, one way to think about yourself and others simultaneously is to buy raffle tickets for Menu for Hope. Each ticket costs $10 and can be applied to any of the incredible prizes being offered (eg, lunch with Harold McGee). The more tickets you put towards a particular prize, the better your chances are to win. All proceeds from the raffle go directly to the U.N. World Food Programme’s work in the African country of Lesotho. (Details here.) As of this minute, more than $68,000 has been raised for the WFP.

Today is the last day of Menu for Hope. Give (and get) now!

Note: To make it easier to estimate your chances of winning, Pim has broken down all the prizes into four categories: Great Odds, Good Odds, Long Shots and Hail-Mary Shots.

Parsnips are lowly and ugly, and we love them for it. (We even wax poetic about them.) Support the most underloved member of the vegetable kingdom: read this week’s root source and eat a parsnip today!

If our recipes inspire you to try and love parsnips, subscribe to the root source and then make one of these:

Recipe: Roasted Honey Parsnip Bisque (Je Mange La Ville)
Recipe: Potato Parsnip Casserole with Apples (Anne’s Food)
Recipe: Parsnip Fries (A Veggie Venture)
Recipe: Confetti Latkes: Parsnip and Carrot Pancakes (Gluten-Free Bay)
Recipe: Chicken Udon with Cabbage and Parsnip (Chocolate & Zucchini)
Recipe: Parsnip Chips with Truffle Oil and Parmesan (The Culinary Chase)

Today’s root source is on the parsnip, the lowly, pale look-alike of the carrot. Earlier this week, while I was standing over the stove stirring a variation of this Italian Broccoli And Potato Soup (to which I’d taken out some of the potatoes and added parsnips instead), I was reminded of a poem I’d heard on Garrison Keillor’s the Writer’s Almanac this past year. It’s “Acceptance Speech,” a poem by Lynn Powell from her book The Zones of Paradise. It nails the underlovedness — the afterthoughtedness — of the parsnip.

Acceptance Speech
by Lynn Powell

The radio’s replaying last night’s winners
and the gratitude of the glamorous,
everyone thanking everybody for making everything
so possible, until I want to shush
the faucet, dry my hands, join in right here
at the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank

my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra,
my children for putting back the growl in hunger,
my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for not
begrudging me this starring role—

without all of them, I know this soup
would not be here tonight.

And let me just add that I could not
have made it without the marrow bone, that blood—
brother to the broth, and the tomatoes
who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas,
the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne
and oregano who dashed in
in the nick of time.

Special thanks, as always, to the salt—
you know who you are—and to the knife,
who revealed the ripe beneath the rind,
the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.

—I hope I’ve not forgotten anyone—
oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip,
those bit players only there to swell the scene,
let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.

But not tonight, not when it’s all
coming to something and the heat is on and
I’m basking in another round
of blue applause.

“Acceptance Speech,” from The Zones of Paradise, The University of Akron Press, copyright 2003 by Lynn Powell. Reprinted by permission of The University of Akron Press.

At Serious Eats, Adam has a breakdown of Menu for Hope prizes that haven’t yet seen a lot of action. (One of them is the autographed copy of the Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook that we’re offering.)

If you buy one $10 raffle ticket for any of these “overlooked gems,” you have a great chance of winning.

Adam’s list is here. Visit chez pim for the full list of Menu for Hope prizes.

UPDATE: The tool’s fixed now. Apologies for the inconvenience.  

Our apologies to all of you who have been trying to use the “cookthink it” search tool this afternoon. We were working on some speed issues today, and for reasons we’re trying to figure out right now, the search tool went into permanent “we’re stumped” mode. While we try to restore some intelligence to the tool, please use the search bar on the left side of the bottom footer of the site.