Cooking On Sale

I figure I’d share this favorite cooking method of mine. I’m a fan of roasting vegetables because you can do it to almost all vegetables. So just buy whatever vegies are on sale throw them together and roast them. It’s an easy lunch that will last for a few days (or until your friends eat them all while you’re at rehearsal like mine did) or an easy side dish to go with whatever protein you’ve found in the supermarket.

To roast vegies, heat your oven to 400°F. Chop up all the vegies into bite-size pieces so the thickest part is somewhere between half an inch and an inch. Toss the vegetables in olive oil (you don’t need much, just enough to coat them). Spread them in a thin layer either on a baking tray or glass baking dish. Sprinkle on salt and pepper and put them in the oven.

You’ll have to check them every 10 minutes. If they look like they’re browning, stir them up and let them keep cooking until they look done. Honestly, I never measure cook-times for this because it’s easy to see when they look done.

Last week I did this with cauliflower, onion, carrots and broccoli.

For the broccoli, I recommend cooking it first via steam or boiling and then roasting for a little with the rest of the vegetables. It’s good to give the broccoli a head start in the cooking process and cook it half-way before roasting.

For carrots, I like to cut them on an angle. It lets the center part of each piece stay fairly firm, but lets the edges soften and brown. You get both textures together.

Currently in my oven, I have asparagus roasting with some minced garlic on top. Mmm. When roasting asparagus, there’s no need to cut into pieces–just snap off the tough parts at the bottom of each spear and lay them side-by-side. They’re thin enough that they don’t need cutting. Throw some lemon juice on them when they’re done and they’ll be delicious.

Beware! Roasting peppers, particularly red peppers is a different game. For those, skip the salt and pepper, don’t cut into pieces, and just throw them on a tray with oil (you can remove the stems and seeds after). Roast them until the skin burns. Make sure to turn them so the skin buns all the way around. Let them cool, and then just use your hands to pull the skin off. It will have detached from the meat of the pepper and come off really easily. Then cut out the stems and remove all of the seeds and voila: whole roasted red peppers. Eat it plain or throw it in some salads (maybe with fresh mozzarella!).

So next time you wonder through the produce section and think you don’t know what to do with that bag of carrots that is on sale, think how easy it is to roast them! You can mix and match vegetables, so the combinations are endless!

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Currently Cooking To:

Radiohead–Vegetable

I’ll admit. I just searched my iTunes for the word vegetable, and this is the only song that came up. Does anyone have any more vegetable-related songs to share? It appears that I may need more of them in my life.

In other news, The Orion Experience is a band I discovered opening for Los Campesinos! in Hoboken maybe a little over a year ago. They’re wonderful and unique and their girl singer is fierce–like Gwen Stefani kind of fierce. Anyway, their music is really fun and gets you pumped for class, parties, or just a night of cooking in your college-kitchen!

The Orion Experience – Cult of Dyonisus
The Orion Experience – Nice Guys Finish Last
The Orion Experience – Sexy Dynamite
The Orion Experience – Obsessed with You

Eat. Listen. Enjoy!

P.S. By the time I finished writing this, my asparagus were done cooking!

Tags: cooking, food, radiohead, roasted vegetables, the orion experience, vegetables

This entry was posted on October 19, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under dinner, lunch, side dish, vegetables. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.