Recipe: oven-roasted potatoes and veggies

Autumn means cooler weather and a return to cozier things, including food: oven dinners, hearty meals and lots of comfort food! Accordingly, I wanted to share a recipe for oven-roasted potatoes and vegetables that’s become a bit of an autumn staple in our house. It’s easy to make—there’s almost no way you can goof it up, short of taking it out of the oven an hour early—and once it’s in the oven you don’t have to check, stir or uncover anything, so it can basically sit unattended all afternoon while you prep other dishes or just relax with a book and a cup of tea.

Read on for the full recipe and how I like to turn this dish into a main course for Thanksgiving!

To make this dish, you will need:

• Several large potatoes + a few large yams (to make dish as shown—or use red and yellow potatoes for more color/flavor variety)
• One to two pounds of carrots (I used a bag of baby carrots)
• Several shoots green onions
• A few stalks of celery
• Several cloves of garlic
• A 16-oz. bottle of Italian dressing/marinade (the cheapie store brand works fine!)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees (F). Chop up the carrots and arrange in a large glass baking dish. Chop up the onions, celery and garlic and spread over the carrots. I’m not normally a big onion person, but our neighbor gave us some delicious green onions from his garden that were just begging to be put in this dish.

Next, chop up the potatoes and arrange over the other vegetables. Large hunks are fine, there’s no need to finely dice them.

Once all the potatoes and vegetables are in the dish, pour most of a 16-oz. bottle of Italian dressing over all. You can use more if you like more intense flavor. Place aluminum foil over the top and place in the oven; bake for two to three hours or until carrots are tender when pierced with a fork. (I like to leave this dish in for three hours just to be on the safe side, but if you’re making a smaller dish two hours will probably suffice.)

And voila! I served this up the other day with butternut squash and garlic bread for an easy evening meal.

If you’re already looking ahead to Thanksgiving, or just want to make this dish into a full meal, here’s what I like to do: place a vegan roast or some meatless “chicken” in the pan (available at natural grocery stores) and cover with the veggies, potatoes and marinade, then bake. Vegan meat substitutes can sometimes be a bit dry after baking, so preparing it this way helps keep it moist and also infuses it with extra flavor, for a more satisfying main course.

What’s your favorite dish to make when the weather turns cooler? Leave me a comment and let me know (or better yet, leave me a link to your recipe post)!