Lest you think all I cook is chocolate and cheesy pasta dishes, here's a vegetable recipe from Cooking Light:Dijon Vegetable Roast
Ingredients
Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 350°.2. Place bread in a food processor; pulse 10 times or until coarse crumbs measure 1/2 cup. Spread crumbs on a baking sheet. Bake at 350° for 5 minutes or until golden.
3. Increase oven temperature to 450°.
4. Combine 4 teaspoons oil, mustard, salt, pepper, and rind in a large bowl; stir well with a whisk.
5. Combine potatoes, onion, and remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons oil in a large bowl; toss well to coat. Place potato mixture on a foil-lined jelly-roll pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 450° for 20 minutes. Add tomatoes and olives to pan. Bake an additional 10 minutes or until potatoes are tender. Add potato mixture to mustard mixture; toss gently to coat. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs.
I didn't quite stick to the recipe: I salted a little bit the potatoes and onions before I roasted them. I added halved artichokes from a can and added them with the olives (although, I think I should have added them with the potatoes to get them nice and brown). I didn't have cherry toms, so I put in canned petite diced tomatoes (next time, I think I'll just leave out the tomatoes if I don't have fresh or dried). I also used lime zest instead of lemon, but I added a splash of lemon juice to the mustard, and I would definitely do that again. I also made way too much sauce... I'll try not to overdo it next time. :)
I didn't quite get the point of the breadcrumbs. Next time, I'll leave them out.
A note on tomatoes: in the last year or so, I've become really intolerant to out of season "fresh" tomatoes. I don't know if it's because anything comes to Indiana has to go by land and not by boat, so tomatoes coming up from Mexico have to be driven, or if there aren't very good greenhouse tomato growers, or whatever (I really don't know how we come to have tomatoes here in the winter, but whatever they're doing, it ain't working), but the tomatoes here in the winter are just awful. They taste like unripe-tomato-flavored snow cones and have the consistency of watermelon rinds, and they cost $4/lb. So, I stopped buying them. If they're not in season, I just use canned tomatoes, or nothing. The book I'm reading now, Animal Vegetable Miracle, is Barbara Kingsolver's new book, and she talks a lot about the importance of buying local produce, which also means you have to buy it in season. I don't agree with a lot of what she says. Sometimes, it seems she skews the facts to make her case stronger without addressing the objections. She also seems to take an add view of things. For example, she seems to regret the decline of smoking in this country because it makes the tobacco farmers have to farm something else, which is sad but lung cancer is sadder. The whole book is about why big agriculture (big corn, big soy) is bad for the farmers and consumers, but why doesn't big tobacco fall into that? Maybe if people could only buy organic, small farm tobacco it would a) be more expensive, so people would smoke less, and b) have fewer carcinogens in it. I just think she should look at both issues the same way.
But this buying local produce in season idea makes a lot of sense to me because I have started tasting the difference. One thing I'd like to eventually try is drying tomatoes, so I can still have un-canned tomatoes even in the winter and spring in dishes like this one that need something that holds up like a tomato and not tomato glop, as in what you would get with canned diced tomatoes. To do this economically, I think I first need some tomato plants, and to do that economically, I think I first need a backyard that I can dig up. So, this will have to wait until we buy a house, but that's ok because I don't know the first thing about drying tomatoes. Except that you need a tomato.
Go Belmont!
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