Colorful Roasted Vegetables

Normal is defined by everyone as the familiar, as what they know. When you’re a child, your normal is defined by your environment, namely, your family. It’s the reason why people start to realize, as they leave the nest and meet other people with different definitions of normal how abnormal their family is.

Love you, family.

This generalization can be applied to a lot of tangental cerebral meanderings, as you may have seen on this blog, but today, I’m aiming for something particular, something food-related, something to do with my mother.

“You eat with your eyes first.” I don’t know where she got it, if it’s a direct quote from someone else or a paraphrasing or just something that she stumbled upon on her own, as so many people have before and after her, but it was her defining mantra in the kitchen. Simple bowls of spaghetti dressed with tomato sauce had a garnish of basil chiffonnade. Corn cobs were stacked high on a white platter. Smaller bowls were used to make food seem plentiful. And there was always, always some sort of color on the plate: red tomato sauce and burnished roasted chicken skin next to green beans. Pesto tortellini with tricolor salad and juicy, pink steak. Yellow saffron rice with circles of brick-red pepperoni and green peas.

My mother’s table was always laden with several dishes: we were required to try a bite of everything, but people soon zeroed in on their favorites for seconds and thirds. My brother is a protein man, my sister reaches for the pasta. As for me, as you probably have gleaned by now, I’m the weird kid who hoarded the last of the cooked carrots, who snacked on broccoli, who now, living alone, can make entire meals out of the vegetable crisper. I love my vegetables.

A lot of vegetables are green. That’s just the way it is, and there’s no changing it. But every so often, I get the urge to play with color.

As I experimented with my camera in the parc des Buttes Chaumont, I stumbled upon a setting for color inversion, and was pleasantly surprised to see before me on the little LCD screen a purple lake with goldenrod flowerbuds and magenta trees. The original is beautiful, but eventually, too much green is too much. It can be nice to look at things through another paradigm.

As for my vegetables, there are a few ways to play with them, but I like this one most of all: a combination of purple, green and orange, something jarring and strange on the plate, but perfect in the way that the root vegetables come together through roasting.

The green vegetables are easily swappable: asparagus in the spring, Brussels sprouts in the winter. Either is delicious, and both bring that little hint of green back to the dish, a bit of the familiar to remind you why, exactly, what you’ve got on your plate isn’t exactly normal.

Colorful Roasted Vegetables

2-3 beets (either pre-roasted or raw)
1 pound asparagus (or 1 pound Brussels sprouts)
2 large carrots
1 red onion
5 cloves garlic
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. thyme

Preheat  oven to 400 degrees F.

If your beets are pre-roasted, cut them into chunks and set aside. If not, pierce the skins with a fork and place in a baking dish. Roast for 45 minutes or until tender.

Meanwhile, prepare the other vegetables. Trim the woody ends of the asparagus and cut into thirds. Cut the bottom ends off the carrots and cut in half widthwise. Cut each shorter carrot into four quarters lengthwise, so you have sixteen pieces total (eight from each carrot) that are approximately the same size as the asparagus. Slice the red onion into half-moons. If using Brussels sprouts, trim the dead leaves from the bottom and slice in half lengthwise.

Toss all the vegetables, along with the still-wrapped garlic cloves, in a baking dish with olive oil and salt. Roast for about 30-35 minutes, tossing once or twice, until tender and caramelized.

If you are using pre-roasted beets, toss the chunks of beets in with the other vegetables for the last 5 minutes of baking, to warm through. Be careful not to toss too much, as the beet juice will dye the other vegetables.

If you are not using pre-roasted beets, remove your tinfoil roasted beets from the oven and allow to cool just enough to be able to handle them. The skins should slide off easily. Cut into chunks and toss with the other vegetables.

Sprinkle the vegetables with thyme and toss lightly.