First, I would like to offer my apologies for my lack of productivity concerning DCBN. I've been super busy pretending to do schoolwork and posting on this other gig I do for the Josef Korbel School. Please learn more about that here: http://jksisadmin.wordpress.com.
Anyway, with the weather starting to cool down (Indian Summer aside), I've been roasting a lot of vegetables. Butternut squash is in season, and I'm a big fan of that, so I've been combining that with a few tubers, chenopods (not chopped, rather roasted whole with the skin on) and selections of the cruciferous variety for a pretty tasty treat.
There's no real recipe for this, but a few tips: what I do is try to cut everything to a similar size to ensure that it all cooks evenly. Once chopped, I mix all the veggies in a bowl with olive oil and garlic. You can play with the spices you add, but last time I also threw in some chopped ginger, cardamom, coriander, garlic salt and pepper. I roast at about 425 degrees for about 45 minutes, stirring halfway through. Make sure that you put foil down on a cookie sheet and spray it with some PAM to reduce the stickage. Also, if you have inherently thinner ingredients, like onions or corn, make sure they aren't hanging out on their own on the periphery of the sheet; they'll burn if they aren't touching the slower-cooking ingredients. With these methods it will come out pretty delicious, especially with a little lemon juice drizzled over the top right out of the oven.
For a healthy, balanced meal you can lay the veggies on a bed of grains, like quinoa or brown rice. If you roasted potatoes with your veggies, you might be okay with just those, but of course it never hurts to have all kinds of complex carbs. They make you happy. This is definitely a meal that is conducive to all kinds of experimentation: with the vegetables you use, the spices you add, the grains you cook, etc. It's a surefire way to something quick and easy with some of your favorite ingredients.
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| Look at me, studyin' and eatin' |
