Foodie Friday: Roasted vegetables!

So if you read yesterday's post, you know that I have lots of vegetables.  What to do with all those veggies before they go bad?  Zucchini's are wonderful, but I can't bring myself to freeze them.  Carrots I don't mind if they are frozen since I make soup out of them later.

Tonight's dinner: zucchini, carrots, onions, garlic and meat.

So how am I going to use all these zucchini?  An easy answer would be zucchini bread, but I've not had luck with that yet.... so I'm going to try something I've been nervous about doing.  Roasting Vegetables.

I'm not a huge roaster.  I just found it kind of intimidating I guess.
So here it goes:

chop up however many vegetables you want to roast.  Root vegetables and zucchini work great for this.
Make sure they are all about the same size!  You don't want some of them to cook faster than others.

Most were about 1/2 inch thick or so

Next, place them in a roasting pan (or some other pan where you can get them to a single layer)

Looking online, I found several recipes.  Most called for 325 degrees F, but I'm winging it and decided to leave my oven at the preset 350 F  that comes on when I turn it on.

Now, drizzle some olive oil on the veggies and season however you want.  I used salt, pepper, and some garlic powder.   You don't want to drown the veggies in oil, just give them a light coating for flavor. Mix them up so they are coated in the oil.

So set your pan o' veggies in the oven and then set the timer for 15 minutes. (times may vary depending on your oven, so always check earlier!)

At 15 minutes, I checked the veggies, stirred, and added some meat to make it a total dinner.

Now, usually, I would brown the meat first, but the meat was pre-cut stew meat, and would be totally cooked by browning.  So I just added it halfway through the roasting.

Set the timer another 15 minutes.

Yummy!

And Done!

Total time cooking: ~ 1/2 an hour (not including chopping time)

Add some rice and you have a completed dinner (or sans rice if you want).

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So in a nutshell:

Roast veggies in an oven at 325 degrees F for 30 minutes.  Add some oil to keep them from drying out too much, and check frequently (since the timing depends on how thick you cut the veggies)

And that's it!