Grilled carrots and parsnips with cilantro sauce

I've grilled carrots before. This weekend, I decided to try grilling parsnips as well. First, I cut off the ends and peeled them. You could skip the peeling step if you'd like, just washing the veggies well. I knew that my guests would prefer peeled veggies.

In this past week's box, there was a large bunch of cilantro.  So I chopped some up to marinate the veggies.

Here are the veggies with salt, pepper, chopped cilantro and some olive oil.  I let them sit for about 8 hours in the fridge.

I also decided to make a cilantro sauce to serve with the veggies.  I put the rest of the bunch of cilantro with a clove of garlic (a rather large one, making the sauce very garlicky), salt and olive oil in a blender and puréed until smooth.

I put the sauce in a little pitcher, but then ended up putting a spoon in it for serving.  I put the sauce, covered, in the fridge until dinner.

When we were ready to grill, I put the marinated veggies into a grilling cage contraption that we got as a wedding gift long ago, which makes it easy to grill the veggies, particularly those that might fall through to the coals.

We put the veggies on the grill. I had read that parsnips would take about 15 minutes to grill. So we set a timer for 7 minutes and covered the grill.

Oops. The parsnips really charred, being in the center of the hot grill and closest to it (with the long handle, the grill cage angles in to the center).

So we only cooked the other side for 3 more minutes, which also charred.  

I let the veggies cool while the meats were being grilled, then cut off the most charred parts of the parsnips. It came off pretty easily, as it was a thick charred layer, leaving the soft center.

 Since the carrots were higher in the grill cage, I didn't need to cut any char off of them.

I served them with the cilantro sauce, which was very garlicky.  If I were to make it again, I'd either use much less garlic.  Better yet, I think I'd skip it altogether and add some chives instead.  The garlic overpowered the cilantro.  I think chives would meld better.