Roasted Root Vegetables and Thanksgiving Reprise

Are you looking for some Thanksgiving basics, or maybe some new ideas, like root vegetables?

Gravy

Killer Cornbread

Turkey Dressing

Cranberry Orange Relish

Scalloped Corn

Pickled Eggs and Beets

Pumpkin Cranberry Bread

and my most popular recipe ever:

Perfect Pie Crust

Today, I offer a quick recipe that would work on the Thanksgiving table,in addition to the reminders of earlier Thanksgiving recipes.

Our grandmothers would have loved this one, because in the middle of the winter, vegetables were scarce.  Poking around the root cellar, they might find a colorful array to brighten the table.

Roasted Root Vegetables

Roasted Root Vegetables

For this dish, I used one parsnip, two rather small rutabagas, five medium carrots and four beets. I peeled or scraped off the tough outer skin on each, cut the rutabagas in quarters and the parsnips in 2″ sticks.  The beets were smallish, so I left them alone.  The idea is to try to make the longer-cooking vegetables smaller, and the quicker cooking ones a bit larger.

I mixed the rutabagas, parsnips and beets with a tablespoon of olive oil, and put them on an aluminum-lined cookie sheet.  The carrots went in later, since they were thin and would cook fast.

I set the oven at 400 degrees and baked the vegetables for 20 minutes, then pulled out the pan and added the carrots and turned all the vegetables on the pan. From here on, you just need to stick the root vegetables with a fork every 5 minutes or so, and start removing the ones that are done. (The fork goes in easily.)

When the root vegetables were all heaped in the serving dish, I sprinkled garlic salt over them, and scattered dried thyme and parsley over the vegetables.  The top of my stove stays hot when I’m baking, so the dish stayed warm. If that doesn’t work for you, you may want to pop them in a microwave for a minute or two just before serving.

(By the way the green-ish wedges are some Japanese eggplant pieces that I had left over.  I happen to like them, but they definitely are not root vegetables, so feel free to ignore them.)

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