Recipe: Roasted Vegetables

Roasted vegetables are one of the easiest ways to prepare vegetables, ever. It literally consists of cutting them into chunks, tossing them in oil (optional) and salt and peppering them (also optional, but really come on) and then plopping them in the oven until the bottom of them get nice and caramelized. Even though you could do this with just one or even up to 800 different vegetables, here's a list of what I used and what I did to them.

Ingredients:

• 2 stalks of broccoli - sliced the stems and cut the florets in half
• 2 stalks of celery - sliced in 1" chunks
  
• 1 pound of button mushroms - cut in half down the stem
• 3 carrots - sliced into 1/2" chunks
• 4 small potatoes - diced into 1/4" chunks
• 2 medium onions - quartered
• Vegetable oil
• Salt-N-Pepa
  
  

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
   
2. Next, cut up your veggies either as I said up there or really however you feel like it. I personally prefer bigger chunks when roasting, but it's really about what you want to be putting in your mouth.
3. Put the veggies in a bowl. You might want to split them up if you don't have a big enough bowl, I know I did.
4. In only one of the bowls, dump some veggie oil in and mix it up.
5. Toss in however much salt and freshly ground pepper as you want into that bowl and then mix that up as well. You could also use other herbs, but I prefer this to be as simple as possible, while still tasting amazing. That being said, it is not at all a bad idea to toss in some oregano and/or rosemary or what have you.
6. If you had to split the veggies up into 2 or more bowls, dump the one with the oiled veggies onto a foiled baking sheet and then add the dry veggies into the oily bowl and repeat 4-6 until you've oiled, salted and peppered all the vegetables and they are all mixed up on the sheet.
   
7. Put them in the oven for like, 60-90 minutes. I forget how long I did it for honestly, just do what feels right to you!
8. Mix them up once or twice, but make sure they remain still for the last 30 minutes or so. This will allow the bottoms of some of the veggies to caramelize. What this means is that they will turn black, get hard and taste WAY more delicious. Caramelization is a wonderful thing that you should definitely take advantage of, as it adds tons of great flavor to everything you do.
9. When they're done you can dump them on a platter and serve them, or just eat them off the sheet. If they're done before the rest of the meal is ready, just turn of the oven and let them chill in there. If you're worried about overcooking them (which you shouldn't be but hey, we're all different) then you can open the oven door for a bit after you turn it off so it can cool down. Make sure you shut it though so the veggies retain as much heat as is possible!

So like I said, this is a really simple recipe. So simple in fact, that I recommend you never come to this page again and just attempt to do it from memory every time you make it! As I mentioned on the meal page for this, none of these recipes had any specific recipe except what I know in my head to be good. This is a skill I DEFINITELY recommend EVERYBODY try to work towards. One great reason is that it allows you to just throw together amazing food with whatever you have on hand. Also, since you know what ingredients go well with others, you can experiment with things that may or may not be such great combos, and you can have a reasonably good idea of what was clashing if it didn't work or what caused it to be delicious.

Enjoy!