Roasted Winter Veggies

The pre-roast phase. Anxious veggies... they know somethin's up... and its not gonna be good..

After reading this post from an educated foodie, I learned:

Roasting Vegetables, the basics:
1. Heat and surface area: Try to have all vegetables in one layer in shallow pan; you want as much of their surface area as possible to be exposed to the hot pan and the hot air in the oven.
2. To brown; you want high heat (use the roaster at 425), make the pan close to heat source. That gets em crispy. You also of course need to cook them, which you can do at any temp for a certain amount of time depending on the size of the veggies (smaller pieces cook faster), shape (longer thinner vs cubes), and temp. Making them soft and more soggy would be done at a lower temp when they are not as close to heat source, as in the roaster oven.
3. Enough EVOO to coat, and enough salt and pepper to your liking is all you really need to season. Thyme, oregano, and rosemary are, however, all good additions. Also a little balsamic vinegar sets of the sweetness nicely.


I used:
8-10 red potatoes
4 med. sized sweet potatoes
1 Large zucchini
A red onion would have been delicious, i forgot...

• I chopped em into roughly one in. size pieces, which worked great. The potatoes take slightly longer to cook it seems. They should be cut smaller than the other two.
• I tossed the chopped veggies with approximately 1.5 Tb. EVOO (can you believe it! Only that much... healthy. I am sooo healthy. Could have used about a 1/2 tb more though), dried oregano, thyme, rosemary, salt, and pepper freely.
• Later, I doused them with balsamic vinaigrette which brought out the sweetness in the veggies and tasted great.
• Preheated to 425. Spread foil onto pan so it wouldn't stick.
• Spread tossed and coated, chopped veggies on shallow large baking pan in almost one layer and cooked on mid rack of oven about 20 mins. They were basically cooked through and soft at that point.
• Then I put them in the roaster for about 15 mins more actually, which didn't really do much, made them somewhat more crispy on outside. Took them out, tossed with the vinegar and more salt, and put them back in another 10 mins. They were then perfectly crispy and sooooo good.

Learned:
1. one layer is good
2 these would have been better with onions
3 in the future, will do roaster for the entire time, but at 400