Roasting Vegetables: Making the Most of the Fall Harvest
The change of seasons brings with it a new group of fruits and vegetables you can enjoy. Apples. root vegetables – like carrots and sweet potatoes – and all the cabbage family foods, like broccoli and cauliflower, are at their peak now. And they’re all great candidates for roasting – one of my favorite fall cooking methods.
With the grilling season over, I start giving a lot more foods the roasting treatment. The oven’s dry heat caramelizes the natural sugars in foods and brings a depth of flavor to fruits and vegetables that summer grilling can’t touch.
If you’ve never roasted root vegetables, you should give them a try. Roasted carrots are particularly delicious. Toss them with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sprinkle with salt and pepper, then spread out on a cookie sheet and roast at 425 degrees for about a half hour until they’re tender. The vinegar turns into a sticky, syrupy glaze that coats them irresistibly. You can give the same treatment to sweet potatoes or beets – tossing them with something tart before roasting like lemon or lime juice, vinegar, or even pomegranate juice contrasts with their natural sweetness.
Roasted veggies make a great side dish, but on the off chance there are any leftovers, they’re great added to soups and stews, or you can slice them up cold and dress with vinaigrette, or add to mixed greens to give some fall flavor to your tossed salad.
I was never much of a cauliflower lover until I started roasting it; now it’s become a fall staple at my house. Roasting softens the strong flavor – the cauliflower gets sweeter, and the texture becomes almost meaty. I coat the florets and a sliced onion with a dash of olive oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and curry powder, and then roast. Broccoli and Brussels sprouts – other veggies that are often a hard sell – are also delicious roasted with some oil and garlic.
You can roast fruits, too – and fall apples are fantastic when they’re prepared this way. Pretty much any variety will do, and you don’t need to peel them – just cut in halves or quarters, remove the core and spread them in a single layer on a cookie sheet sprayed with nonstick spray and roast like you would the veggies. You can toss them with a little lemon juice, apple juice or spices first if you want, but if you start with tasty fresh apples, they’re really good on their own.
Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.
Tags: fruits and vegetables, herbalife, nutrition, roasted veggies, roasting vegetables, vegetable recipes
hello, i just found this site, n very nice info..
Wonderful. I might add that if you roast a variety of different vegetables, then puree them in your blender, add a quart or so of chicken or vegetable broth, you will have a soup that everyone will rave about. With the snow season just around the corner, soup can often be our main meal, with a nice sour dough roll, and “let it snow”
Thanks for the great information.
A little concerned….I read that roasting vegetables at high heat causes changes in the enzymes that are not good for you. I love the taste of roasting, but is it really the most healthy way to eat them?
Thank you for your question. There are many healthy ways to consume vegetables, including raw, steamed, stir-fried and roasted. Enzymes are small proteins that naturally occur in plants and serve various functions to the plant. Heat does render these enzymes inactive, but plant enzymes serve no function to humans, since we make our own. And, like all proteins, enzymes are broken down during the digestive process into their basic amino acid units to facilitate absorption. There are no health risks associated with eating roasted vegetables, so I hope you will continue to enjoy preparing and eating them this way.