Homemade Friday: Roasted Root Veggies

Now, this may technically be considered baby food since I found it in this cookbook, but since my oldest child refused to even look at the finished product and the youngest just walked around with a piece, randomly taking bites and spitting them on the floor, I think it’s safe to call this an adult dish.  Unless you have better luck than I do and your children aren’t so picky that it makes you want to claw your face off if they would just take a bite of something other than spaghetti and cheese without complaining and whining.

Can you tell it’s been a rough day?  It’s been a rough day.  I wish someone would tell both of my children that sleeping is awesome and when they don’t sleep at night, I don’t sleep at night, and yes, I realize that they are tired and grouchy but SO AM I BECAUSE YOU WOKE ME UP AT MIDNIGHT AND KEPT ME UP UNTIL 2 A.M. SO DEAL WITH MY IRRITABILITY AND STOP WHINING.

Aaaaannnnnnd I think I’m done with that.

Back to the veggies.

I’d bought a bunch of beets and a rutabaga for god knows what reason.  I think I wanted to expand my children’s palate in a sneaky way, but time got away from me and those root veggies were looking less than stellar in the bottom of my refrigerator.  So I went searching with something to do with them.  I found this recipe for beet hummus, which looks fantastic.  But I worried about staining.  I was fairly certain that I would not want to give it to Adele to eat alone as I also am a walking Laundromat and didn’t want to add to my time spent there.

There also is this recipe for beet pancakes, which also looks fantastic, but I didn’t want to take that much time to make it.  I wanted something easy. 

And then I remembered the recipe for vegetable oven fries in the babyfood cookbook and thought it would be perfect.  It’s a bit time-consuming since everything has to be cut into fry shape, but overall super simple. 

I used a couple of small sweet potatoes that I had on hand, the rutabaga, and two beets.  If you make this, keep in mind that the beets stain pretty strongly, but it only lasted on my hands until the end of the day.  That may not be a good judge, though, because I wash my hands an average of 3,596 times a day.  Not because I’m a clean freak or anything, but because of the whole cloth diaper thing.  I will not elaborate, for your sake.

Preheat the oven to 500 and line a couple of baking sheets with foil, then grease the foil.  I guess you don’t have to use foil, but it makes cleaning up a lot faster.  Veggies are peeled and cut, then toss them with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon each of fresh thyme, parsley and sage, and ½ teaspoon of sea salt.  Or I guess any salt you have on hand.  I didn’t have fresh thyme or parsley.  I did have some sage that is hanging on outside so I used it.  I used about a teaspoon of dried thyme and just left out the parsley.  I’m sure you could just use whatever you had.

Put them in a single layer on the baking sheets and bake about 20-25 minutes until they’re tender and roasted.  You were supposed to turn them while they were baking but I didn’t read that far into the recipe and just left them alone until they were done.

And it didn’t matter one bit. 

These were amazing.  Soft and a little, I don’t know, caramelized maybe?  The sweet potatoes were my favorite but each one had something going for it.  I loved them.  LOVED THEM.

But as I said my children wouldn’t eat them.  But that’s okay.  It just meant that I got to eat most of them myself.  (I did have to share with Chris, unfortunately.)