What do you do when you open your refrigerator vegetable bin and find an odd lot of vegetables that you'll lose if you don't do something with them soon. Don't wait. Gather them up, wash them, trim roots, peel, and arrange them in a roasting pan to make a nice looking presentation.
Last nights roast included cabbage, potatoes, sweet onions, beet greens, and beets. When I have beets, I try to separate them from other vegetables so they don't color the other vegetables. Some people cut off beet greens and throw them away. What a shame. They are so sweet and delicious.
Last week's roast included potatoes, small white turnips, Vidalia onions, and about two dozen cloves of garlic. I tucked the garlic in between the vegetables throughout the pan. Goodness how delicious. When you eat one of the roasted garlic cloves it's like biting into a piece of candy!
Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.
Arrange the vegetables in the roasting pan. Drizzle the vegetables with olive oil. Salt and pepper the vegetables to suit your taste. Cover the pan with aluminum foil. Then pop the roasting pan in the oven and roast the vegetables for about two to two and a half hours. Goodness how delicious!
Some vegetables roast better than others. For example, cabbage is sometimes still a bit firm (but still good to eat). There is nothing quite so good as root vegetables such as potatoes, turnips, carrots, leeks, onions. And if you have it, don't forget the garlic cloves!
Here's a good story. When George Whitman, owner of the Paris English language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, met customers and learned they were travelers, he nearly always said, "You can sleep here in the bookshop if you like. There are sofas and chairs throughout." Some folks took him up on the offer. I didn't. I was forewarned that the sofas were full of bedbugs. Some guests of the house reportedly slept at the shop for weeks. One guest, Jeremy Mercer, author of Books, Bedbugs, and Baguettes, writes that George often fed his guests a soup made of vegetables he gathered from the throw away bins of street market vendors. Reportedly, George just cut out the bad spots, washed them up, and cooked them in water. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it.
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