TracyFood

Recipe: Roasted Summer Vegetables 24 August 2007 9:55 pm

Posted by Tracy in : CSA, cooking, eating, local food, recipes, seasonality, summer, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

This is an approximation of the roasted vegetables I made for dinner on Wednesday night, based on a recipe I wrote up on Everything2 way back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth. My favorite cookbook reference for roasted vegetables (and many other things, of course) is Moosewood Restaurant New Classics, specifically the Roasted Vegetables for Pasta and Roasted Winter Vegetables recipes, although my version of their Moroccan Roasted Vegetables was a big hit at Sundance (but the story of that particular stalker will have to wait for another time). Anyway. Those recipes are particularly useful when I’m not sure how thick to cut up various vegetables, but mostly this cooking method is super-forgiving, and I make a lot up myself as I go along, without really measuring anything. So take my amounts with a grain of salt.

You Will Need:

Equipment:

a baking tray — preferably not a baking sheet, as the vegetable dressing/marinade would leak off it and make a big mess in
an oven
a big bowl for the vegetables
a little bowl for making dressing/marinade in
a mortar and pestle or garlic press although it’s always okay to cut garlic instead of pressing it
a whisk
a knife for cutting up vegetables
a cutting board

Ingredients

Veggies (basically you want a nice big pile of bite-size or slightly bigger pieces, and a mix of pretty colors is always good, so the following are just suggestions and you should feel free to improvise)

1 onion (we have these huge gorgeous Walla Walla sweet onions from our CSA right now and they are spectacular, like 2-3 pounds each)
1 carrot (not necessarily a summer vegetable, but hey)
1 green bell pepper
2 medium tomatoes (a 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes works, too)
1 pretty little heirloom summer squash, or maybe just one or two zucchini and/or yellow summer squash
2 stalks broccoli (maybe a pound?)

Dressing/Marinade

olive oil
balsamic vinegar
dried thyme
dried oregano
salt
fresh ground black pepper (so much better than the preground kind which is always freaking stale)
(at least) 4 cloves of garlic, pressed

For Later

fresh basil
(optional) fresh-grated Parmesan or Romano cheese (Asiago and feta can both be delicious, too)

What You Do:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Cut the veggies up into bite-size pieces, maybe rough 1-inch square pieces (except if you’re using carrot, which takes longer to get done: cut it in half lengthwise, then slice into 1/2-inch thick pieces). Put the cut veggies in the big bowl.

In the smaller bowl, whisk together maybe 1/4 cup of olive oil and 1/8 cup vinegar for every 2 cups of veggies in the big bowl. Add big pinches (half-teaspoons?) of each of the dried herbs and salt, and grind in some pepper. Peel and clean the garlic; press or chop it into the mixture as well (or grind it with the herbs and salt if you’re using a mortar and pestle). Whisk it together till it’s more or less all one consistency. This step is completely optional if you’re feeling very confident that you know the right amount of sauce your veggies need; otherwise it’s really nice to make the sauce separately and hold some back if it turns out you made too much (in which case it’s not far from Shallot-Balsamic Vinaigrette, albeit with garlic instead of shallots, so that’s a potential use for leftovers if you have any). I did try to err on the low side with these dressing amounts, but like I said before, grain of salt and all that.

Pour the dressinade over the veggies and toss till they’re all coated. If it looks like you didn’t make enough to coat them all, make another (smaller) mixture of oil, vinegar, herbs, salt, and pepper, add it in, and repeat the tossing/coating process.

If you plan to serve the veggies on pasta (as I’ve done in the past, to great success) or rice (I bet this would be good, too), start water boiling now, or maybe a little earlier. I forgot to do this the first time I made this recipe, and felt a little foolish when the veggies were ready and my starch wasn’t.

Spread the veggies out on the baking tray (or use two trays if you’ve got them) and roast them in the oven for 15 minutes. Take them out of the oven, mix in 1/8 to 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil (I cut it up quickly with scissors) and return them to the oven. (If cooking basil even ten more minutes is heresy to you, leave this step until right before serving.)

After another 10 minutes, take the vegetables out of the oven and stir one more time. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper if you like, and return them to the oven one last time. Turn the oven off; it’s plenty hot enough to keep the veggies warm while you’re finishing the rest of the meal preparations (setting the table if that’s how you roll, or just checking on your starch, whatever; if you want to use polenta as your starch, it’s not too late to start some stock boiling now; that stuff whisks up all kinds of fast, especially if you substitute coarsely ground cornmeal — though not corn flour — for some of the polenta).

When the starch is done, drain it and serve immediately with heaping scoops of roasted veggies spread on top; grate a little Parmesan on for added tasty goodness. Yum!

Notes

Total preparation and cooking time was about an hour, but that could speed up or slow down depending on your veggies and your choice of starch. Servings made will depend entirely on the amount of veggies you roast. Figure on two cups of vegetables for every person you plan on serving, because they tend to shrink while roasting, and also because the leftovers are good for many uses (maybe soup, salad or pizza toppings, or omelet/omelette fillings). If you’re feeling very cunning, you might want to measure your veggies into the container you’re roasting them in before tossing them with dressing in a bowl, just to prevent a “holy crap this is more food than will fit in my oven” crisis-type situation.

Work with whatever you have in your kitchen; it will be delicious. Other good veggie possibilities for this treat include eggplant and mushrooms (white or cremini because they’re so perfectly sized when you slice them in half). We had both of these in the fridge but I forgot them in the excitement about the giant mystery squash.

There’s a lot of cleanup for this meal, as the long equipment list might suggest; also, the baking tray got pretty splattered with dressinade as everything cooked (and it’s almost as hard to clean as the sauce for balsamic baked tofu).