Tesco Recipe Card - Pancetta Wrapped Parsnips & Red Cabbage with Cranberries

This recipe card caught my eye as a different way of doing my Christmas dinner vegetables. Usually I roast the parsnips with some wholegrain mustard and cook red cabbage with apples and sunflower seeds.

The card is from Tesco's Christmas collection and  features two recipes:

Pancetta-wrapped parsnips

Slow-cooked red cabbage with cranberries

I'll talk about the parsnips first. I used streaky bacon instead of pancetta because it's cheaper and I'm not too fussy about the difference in taste. I don't usually par-boil parsnips, especially when they are cut this finely but I thought I would follow the recipe. I accidentally boiled them for a couple of minutes longer that stated so they were quite soft and some had even turned to mush as I was trying to wrap them in the bacon. As you can see from my photo, the ends of my parsnips were quite thin so they got quite brown and in some cases a little bit burnt. I think I'd try and cut then more evenly next time but it's quite hard with a vegetable that is tapered!

The result:  the pancetta-wrapped parsnips were very tasty and everybody loved them. I will definitely make these again, and not just for Christmas either, these would be great with a Sunday roast.

The "slow-cooked" red cabbage with cranberries are not cooked in a slow cooker, but on the hob. I used a red onion instead of a white onion and I substituted cider vinegar for the red wine vinegar. I didn't add any cranberry sauce because I felt that there was already quite a bit of sugar in this as it was. 

The result: SOUR...despite all the sugar, the cranberries made this very sour. I don;t think the cranberry sauce would have added enough sweetness to counter the sourness of the cranberries. It was edible and one person at the table really liked it because it was sour. I wouldn't make this again; I'll stick to my tried and tested red cabbage with apple and sunflower seeds.

Overall, Christmas dinner was successful (except for the pudding which I will talk about in another post) and I enjoyed trying out these new recipes.

I hope you had a lovely Christmas and a tasty dinner!