Roasted Root Vegetables Recipe (With Video)

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re going to make some roasted root vegetables.

Now it is still winter and root vegetables are excellent things to eat in the winter for a couple of reasons. One, they store most easily over the winter so you can get fairly local stuff or if your growing it on your own. It’s the best thing to eat out from your garden because you can keep it cool throughout the winter and just keep eating it.

The other reason is that because its winter our bodies are looking for something a little bit warming and root vegetable needs to be cook in order to be digested properly so we cooked them, add warmth to the vegetable which add warmth to your body.

So tonight we’re gonna use some carrots, classic! As well as some parsnips which many people haven’t tried or a little bit afraid of. Parsnips on their own, I’m not a big fan of, they have a bit of tangy kind of flavor but when they’re roasted and especially when we put this orange sauce on its gonna give a really nice sweet flavor, they’re delicious!

So, parsnips as well as beets and this is probably the largest beet I’ve seen in quite some time and I just couldn’t resist the massiveness of this beet.

So we’re gonna start by making the sauce which is going to be an orange sauce, we’re just gonna add some spices to it but orange is gonna be the basis of this sauce.

And because there is sugar in this orange it will work as kind of a glazed. A glaze is when the sauce thickens a little bit around whatever your cooking really nice.

Start with the orange zest it. Zesting is where you take out – take off the very outer part of the peel of a citrus fruit. Not only are the peels packed with really awesome flavor but there are nutrients in the peel as well so anytime I’m using a citrus fruit, you’ll probably gonna see me zesting it.

And this is the zester here very cheap, very inexpensive, you can use a grater if you wish but be careful not to go too far into the orange. If you get into this white part on the outside, it’s called the pith. It is very bitter and it’s not gonna taste all that nice.

To juice I just poke the orange with my zester and give it a squeeze, occasionally I squirt myself in the eye, this is a hazard of being a chef. You just gotta suck it up and deal with it.

Alright! I manage to escape today without any squirting in the eye. Orange isn’t that bad anyway, it’s really the lemon and the grape fruit that causes some major stinging to go.

Now, next into our orange juice and orange zest I’m gonna add just a little bit olive oil. You really don’t need very much, I think I about a tablespoon but basically it’s just to give it a little bit more body when it’s going around these vegetables.

I’m also gonna add some tamari and tamari is a soy sauce but it’s a fermented soy sauce which means that it’s much more easily process by your body because some of the protein in the soy has been broken down in that fermentation process. You can use soy sauce if you like but just pay attention to how you digest it, if you have trouble with it like I do you might wanna try tamari.

Ok! next I’m gonna take some ginger and I’m going to grate it in order not to have such an intense ginger flavor because we’re not gonna cook this sauce at all before it goes into the oven with the vegetables and all I’m gonna do is take my ginger, it got its skin and everything, just grate it on my grater.

This kind of grater is important for ginger because the ginger doesn’t go through the other side, it’s a solid grater so what’s gonna happen at the end is I’m gonna bunch up all these ginger pulp and squeeze the juice out.

Once the ginger has been all grated, you’re just going to collect it on one edge and best is to have a little area like this where you can squeeze the ginger and see that juice coming out at the bottom there, that’s what’s gonna go into my sauce, not the actual ginger.

It's best if you have some ginger that’s really fresh, this ginger has been sitting at my house for a couple of days so it’s not the freshest and it’s not the juiciest but it will work.

Use my little egg dude to give it a little whisk, Phil likes to go into the action every now and then he doesn’t get to beat any eggs so he needs to beat something.

Finishing touches for this sauce are gonna be some cinnamon for a little sweetness and again I’ve put measurements in here but just sprinkle some in until it feels right. A bit of nutmeg and to spice it up a little bit I’m going to add some paprika; cayenne is also nice in here. Paprika is a little bit softer and smokier, cayenne is just plain spicy. So depending on what you like you can go with either of those, get the little egg dude a little work out and we’ll put that aside.

Next I’m going to do is prepare the vegetables so with carrots I don’t peel them because they have a lot of nutrition in the peel it’s actually where a lot of their nutrients are living and the peel on carrots is kind of nice.

With the beets and the parsnips I’m going to peel them because they’re a little bit thicker of a te peel but if you’re ok with it. They also have nutrition in their peels. Parsnips more so I might eat but beets, beets skin a little bit depends on what your beets are if you have a beet this size, it’s gonna have a pretty tough skin on it.

So just rinse these guys off and they’re gonna get slice and you can cut them in chunks if you like but if you slice them, they’re gonna take less time to cook. And the less time it takes to cook, the less time they’re in the oven seems a little bit in true to it, isn’t it? but what I’m saying is the less time they are in the oven, the less time they are in high heat and the more they will retain their nutrients.

I just thought I would show you for those who like to compost or maybe want to start composting but feel like it would be too much of a pain of always taking the scraps out to the compost. What I do is I take a bucket and I have all of my waste from the meal in this bucket.

And then I’m lucky coz Phil likes to help in the kitchen so when he ask for something to help with I say “oh you could take out the compost.” “Very easy!” we’ll pour this on top of the vegetables, now on this sauce you might have notice that I didn’t use any salt.

Normally salt would be in the sauce in order to bring the flavors together as well as the vinegar and the oil together, in this case we’re using orange as our acid instead of vinegar which is gonna be lot softer and nicer for the body and the salt comes in from the tamari or your soy sauce. They both have quite a bit of salt so if you’re using them and you’re in a low sodium diet you wanna be careful.

Now I find the best way to mix up vegetables with the sauce is mostly by using my hands so make sure you clean them before you get them in here and they’re probably gonna turned fairly red from the beets. Kind of fun!

Once you get the sauce stir together your gonna pop this on the oven, 350F is a pretty good temperature. You can preheat the oven or you can just turn it on when the vegetables go in. Vegetables aren’t too picky with that kind of thing and then they’re gonna go in until they’re soft which will probably take about 30 to 45 minutes depending on how big you’ve made your slices.

So I hope you enjoy, you can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.