Chus On Chow

So we’re getting this pile of vegetables from the CSA every Tuesday. Our job is to figure out ways to use up all the vegetables in a tasty manner. The biggest challenge is to do it without a recipe, without doing an ingredients search at All-Recipes, and without calling our-son-the-chef. Dave was busy solving programming problems last night so it fell to me to fumble around with the food. So I started with the raw ingredients. The herbs came from our garden, everything else came from the CSA delivery:

We’ve got a nice red onion, some fennel, sweet carrots, one leek, garlic, potatoes, thyme, rosemary and one giant rutabaga. Oh yeah. Remember I said I can’t afford to throw away food that we already have? In went the baby carrots, grown somewhere in the USA:

I just chopped everything and stuck them in a couple roasting pans. I poured a liberal amount of olive oil (Spain) over the veggies and then seasoned them with salt (France – which is odd, considering Syracuse is known as the “salt city“), pepper (India), and Dinosaur Barbecue Cajun Foreplay (Syracuse and exotic places from whence come the “exotic spices”). I tossed it all by hand, used half a bar of soap (Syracuse) to get the oil off, and stuck the pans in the oven at somewhere around 400 degrees.

I stirred them around every 20 minutes or so. After the first 40 minutes they started caramelizing and smelling really good. I don’t know when they were done. I looked at them and at one point said, “they’re done.” And that was that.

There is no easier way to make a bunch of unrelated vegetables taste great with minimum effort. A few observations, though:

1. Vegetables require that you spend some time preparing them. This is offset by the time you don’t spend sick in bed or in the doctor’s office because you haven’t been eating vegetables for the past forty years.

2. It really does make sense to keep a medium-size bowl near the prep board for tossing all the extra stuff real vegetables give off when you prep them for roasting.

3. I need a compost pile! This is absurd, throwing all these great peels and ends and stuff into the trash. Absolutely absurd. Next item on the list (after the second raised bed garden).

4. Rutabaga. This is the second method I’ve used on rutabaga, and I still don’t like it. It was too much, but thankfully it was really easy to eat around it. So please, if you have a truly delicious method for preparing this great root vegetable that I really don’t like, let us all know through the comment box below! I still have so much to learn about vegetables.