Roasted Vegetables

Have you seen the employment figures lately? Ha ha ha.... aaaaaugh! Sigh. In tough times like these it's necessary to find other uses for your oven, to prevent you from sticking your head in there and breathing deeply.

As unemployed people, it's also necessary that we make do with what we've got. For instance, the Food Network. The Food Network is awesome and inspiring, but who has pickled red pepper lying around? And at this point, we're not exactly going out to buy it.

Which brings me to root vegetables.

While I was cleaning out the fridge, this is what I found:

One sweet potato
Two red potatoes
Two parsnips (mmm!)
One and a half carrots (?)

This is a pretty typical haul, I think. They're long-lasting veg that I probably bought a week or so ago, and they probably would've lasted in the fridge for a while longer. One thing I did while I was working was do a weekly supermarket run: basically, whatever day I remembered to grab the canvas bag on the way out the door, that was grocery day.

Get chicken... Oh, dammit!

This is why it helps not to be an idiot. Freezing meat is a good thing to do, I think -- long before the Day of the Pink Slip I would buy meat that was on sale (usually because it was within a day or two of its sell-by date) and them immediately stick it in the freezer. Of course, it helps to actually defrost the meat when you want to use it in a meal. Like now. So, chicken goes in the fridge and we're going to just make roasted veggies, and hold half of them over to tomorrow.

Peel everything, though you can pretty much leave the skin on the potatoes -- I just gouge out their eyes! Grrr!

So, back to the theory of impulse grocery shopping: the downside of is that I didn't really make a list before going, and I also tended not to see what I already had in the fridge. Looking back, I realise I was wasting an enormous amount of food, either because I forgot stuff and shoved it back in the fridge or I bought the same item twice. Bad, bad habit.

Chop everything up, dump in cooking dish (this is a Le Creuset cast-iron enameled soup pot, with which I am obsessed).

Add in a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of pepper, a teaspoon of dried thyme and a teaspoon of dried rosemary. Dash in a few tablespoons of olive oil, and mix mix mix.

Oh, you thought I forgot the garlic on the cutting board? I did not! Three cloves of garlic, do the Food Network thing and thwack them with the side of a knife before peeling then and chucking them in with the rest. You can put less in if you're not a fan of garlic. Other things that would be very nice in this? Quartered onion, leeks (wash carefully, full of sand), probably fennel -- you could also use fresh rosemary instead of the dried stuff, but since frugal is currently my watchword, I'm going with dried.

Keep your eye on the garlic when you mix, and try and spread the cloves out a bit. If they bunch up, I don't think the flavour carries through as much. Have I mentioned I love garlic?

Mmmmmm.

Okay, we're good. Stick it in the preheated oven, set an alarm for 30 minutes.

I've done this in a roasting pan before, and it's extremely good. If you like your roasted veg crispier (and more impressive in presentation), then this is probably the way to go. Spray the roasting pan with oil before spreading the mix across it in a single layer -- and when you're cutting the vegetables, make them nice quarter-inch chunks. That way the edges get all brown and lovely. If you do it in a pan like the one I've used, the vegetables are going to stay more moist and only brown in bits. It's also going to look a lot less pretty on your plate.

Once the buzzer goes, take the mix out, stir it up (make sure to get any bits that have browned against the bottom) and pop it back in. Another 30 minutes, and you're done.

Voila! One of the most comforting winter side dishes I've ever known. It's fantastic with lemon chicken, but clearly we're experiencing some technical difficulties on that front, so it'll have to wait for tomorrow. For now, I'm eating half of this now, because it's delicious. So there.