A few days ago I decided to clean out the vegetable bin and found some fennel and parsnips. I had heard a podcast on Good Food last fall about roasting root veggies and decided to combine the fennel and parsnips with some onions and potatoes to make a nice side dish to go with the Coq Au Vin I was making for dinner that night. The roasted veggies were super easy to make, just scrub them and peel or not, depending on your preference, drizzle with olive oil, add a generous grind of pepper and some kosher salt to taste, and roast at 400 degrees f. for about 30 minutes. Stir every 10 minutes or so. You can tell they are done when the hardest vegetable is fork tender.We had a nice discussion during dinner about the recipes I used. David asked me how there can be so many different recipes for the same thing. He is planning on being a chef, so he has been doing a lot of cooking with us. I said that you can mix up the ingredients in just about any recipe to suit what you have on hand. I explained to him that recipes can vary not just from country to country, but from region to region and even city to city. Ray then said, "yeah, it's not like baking", meaning baking is more like chemistry, with exact measurements and specific ingredients that do a particular thing. Cooking is more like art, it is a creative endeavor. Anyway, the end result was good food and full bellies!
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