autumn | Our Austintatious Life

We roast vegetables all year-round; however, I’ll be honest that I always look forward to fall when the squashes come into season. This is our first time for this year to use an autumn/winter squash and we’re using a Delicata squash this time. These squash are creamy and the skin is so soft that you don’t have to peel the skin off before you bake them.

Roasted autumn vegetables

Ingredients

1 Delicata squash – seeded and cut into 1 inch pieces
2 to 3 carrots – peeled and cut into 1/2 inch slices on a bias
2 Russet potatoes – you could also use red or gold. Cut into 1 inch cubes
1 Fennel root – cut into 1 inch pieces
1 Sweet Onion – cut into 1 inch pieces
1/4 cup Olive Oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon fresh cracked pepper
1 pinch to a teaspoon of red pepper flakes for a light kick!

Instructions

Heat your oven 400 degrees F.

Cut all the vegetables into one inch pieces. The delicata can be cut in half lengthwise, then in half crosswise. Scoop out the seeds, then cut slices about 1/2 inch. Then, cut these slices into about 1 inch pieces. The main thing is to keep the size of all the vegetables approximately the same so they cook consistently.

A trick to the potatoes is to rinse them in cool water to help them brown easier in the oven.

Mix all the vegetables into a large bowl then add the olive oil, salt, black pepper and pepper flake. Mix well.

Put the vegetable mixture into a large oven roasting pan. If you want to cut down on the amount of ingredients, you can probably fit them all onto a baking sheet. We line the bottom of our roasting pan with foil to make it easier to cleanup when we’re done.

Bake the vegetables for 30 to 35 minutes until all the vegetables are tender but not mushy.

I’ll note that we intentionally under salted so that the vegetables don’t sweat too much. You can sprinkle a little extra salt over the cooked vegetables if you want or add it to your taste at the table.

This should make enough for 4 large servings or 6 side dish servings.

Variations: Depending on what fresh herbs you have on hand and what you’ll be serving this with, you can add some herbs to this. We like to add parsley, sage, rosemary, and/or thyme. Yes, I couldn’t resist the music reference but it’s true. They all work really well with these vegetables.

We found a great bargain on sweet potatoes and stocked up on them. When we got home, we started looking online for some options on how to prepare them. Tonight, we settled on roasting them with rosemary and garlic. It’s very similar to our recipe for roasted beets. We just kind of winged it by combining a few recipes that we found. One thing we added was chopped walnuts and red pepper flakes. Some of the recipes had these so I thought it sounded like a great addition to give it a nice fall, earthy flavor. These are optional and I am sure it would taste fine without them. however, the roasted walnuts really are a nice addition to this recipe.

Ingredients

2 medium-large sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary (adjust to taste)
3 cloves of chopped garlic
1 teaspoon of sea salt
2 tablespoons of olive oil (enough to coat the potatoes)
1/2 cup of chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)
light sprinkling of red pepper flakes (adjust to taste)

Directions

Preheat your oven to 425.

Wash your potatoes thoroughly. We like to leave the skins on them so we use a scrubber on them to remove all the dirt and debris on the outside of them. However, you can peel them it you don’t like the skins. Cut your sweet potatoes into 1 inch cubes and place them in a large bowl. Add your chopped rosemary, garlic, sea salt, nuts and pepper flakes. Now add that olive oil and mix to get an even coating of olive oil on all the potato cubes.