Légumes d'hiver rôtis au four

That's ‘winter vegetables roasted in the oven’. It was our lunch yesterday. It all started when we were in Blois last Friday and we stopped to look around in the Grand Frais produce market up there.

What we found was a good sale on all kinds of winter root vegetables, all at one euro a kilo. We bought some of course. My idea was soup or some kind of stew. Walt had a good idea too — he wanted to roast them in the oven. Yesterday he did it.

Here's a list of the vegetables he cooked:

Ail – Garlic
Carottes – Carrots
Navets – Turnips
Oignons – Onions
Panais – Parsnips
Patates douces – Sweet potatoes
Pommes de terre – Potatoes
Romarin – Rosemary
Rutabagas – Rutabagas (Swede)

He peeled them all and cut them into pieces of fairly uniform size. Then he tossed them in duck fat and spread them out in a single layer on a baking pan. He used duck fat, which made the result especially tasty, but you might use olive oil or some other oil, and maybe a little butter to get a similar result. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper before cooking. Walt used rosemary for flavor, but thyme would be good too.

He also added two chicken thigh/leg sections to the tray. All of it went into the oven at 425ºF (210ºC) for about 45 minutes. Midway through the cooking, you can turn the vegetables over, or stir them around a little, so that they brown evenly. And it they start to get too brown, just turn down the heat.

Test the vegetables for doneness by poking them with a knife or skewer. The carrots take the longest too cook, I think, so they could be parboiled before they go into the oven. Even so, the carrots we had ended up just fine, and the chicken was ready too by the time the vegetables were.