Back To Basics: Roasted Vegetables

There are few things that get my appetite stirring like roasted vegetables.  I love them, and just can’t get enough of them.  One of the best parts about roasted vegetables is that the combinations are limited only by your imagination.  You can use any blend of vegetables you wish, the one thing you need to consider is cook time, and how long each vegetable will take to cook.  For example, cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, and winter squash all take a longer time to cook, where veggies like zucchini, tomatoes, asparagus and green beans cook fairly quickly.  Frequently you will see root vegetables roasted together in a medley, but I have found that you can combine quick cooking and long cooking vegetables simply by adjusting the size of the pieces you cook with.  So when I want to do a medley of potatoes, red bell pepper and broccoli, I will chunk the peppers nice and large, dice the potatoes small, and cut the broccoli into smaller florets.  Generally, 20 minutes in the hot oven will cook them perfectly and evenly.  Mushrooms and onions are the two items that to me, it doesn’t matter what size they are.  The darker mushrooms and onions get, the more delicious they get, but they’re also perfectly delicious lightly cooked, so I win with them no matter how I cut them.

Anyway.  For this particular medley, I chose to do an empty-out-the-fridge toss and just used bits of everything for which I had no other purpose.  I used some fresh green beans that were a touch past their prime, a piece of a head of cauliflower, half of a zucchini, and a pair of fat scallions.  I cut everything roughly the same size, cut the scallions into 1-inch pieces and tossed everything onto a baking sheet.

Next, I gave the vegetables a decent drizzle of olive oil.  If you’re feeling particularly decadent, use melted butter as well for an added layer of deliciousness, but in this case, I just went with olive oil. The oil is going to add a lot more flavor than you would expect, and is also crucial to even cooking- and those crispy evenly brown bits along the edges.

Then you need to decide on your seasonings.  My first choice in the pantry was a bottle of Penzey’s Tuscan Sunset, it’s a great herb blend that I’ve found works in just about everything.  It’s also salt-free, so if you’re watching your salt intake, this is a great way to get flavor without the salt.  Since we’re not watching our salt, I also grabbed the seasoned salt, and then, roasted vegetables just aren’t roasted vegetables without black pepper.  Season pretty liberally.

Then you need to give the vegetables a toss to evenly distribute the seasonings and the olive oil.

Finally, spread the vegetables evenly on your baking sheet.

Pop into a pre-heated oven set to 425.  Let them roast for about 10 minutes, and then give them a toss with a spatula.  Roast for another 10 minutes and check them again.  They can be nicely done at this point- tender and full of flavor, and here is where you make your judgement call as to whether they are roasted to your satisfaction, or you can give them another toss and pop them back into the oven for another 10 minutes.   If you’re using onions or garlic, you’ll want to keep an eye on them to keep them from burning- dark brown is good and delicious for the onions, but you definitely don’t want them charred beyond recognition.

Then you can dig in! Eat them straight off the pan if you like, share if you must, but enjoy them to your heart’s satsifaction.  Leftover roasted vegetables make great fritatta and sandwich fillings, or pizza toppings.  A lot of leftover roasted vegetables can be blended with some broth to make a delicious roasted vegetable soup.  But to be honest, I just don’t know that much about roasted vegetable leftovers, because they are just too good to wrap up and put in the fridge for another day.  Roasted vegetables are a very, very good thing.