Rosemary | Our Austintatious Life

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.

This is our mixture of potatoes, rosemary, garlic and walnuts

Place the potatoes in one layer on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 425 until they are golden, about 30 minutes.

The finished product just out of the oven.

Beets, they are one of the foods that people really like or really dislike. I’ve slowly discovered that almost everyone who eats them had a bad experience as a child with beets. My Granny always fed them to me and now I always think of her when I eat them. I guess that’s just one of the reason I love eating these bright, sweet roots.

We’ve been making this roasted beet recipe for a while and really enjoy it. It has a great earthy flavor and is very colorful. In the ingredients below, I list 1 red and 1 golden beet. You can use any kind of beet that you like. We usually just use red beets but this past Saturday we were walking around the new Whole Foods in Far South Austin and saw these bunches of golden beets that looked so good we couldn’t leave without them! There are also some that are red and white that are great if you can find them.

Here is the gold beet (uncut), 1/2 of the red beet and our carrots

If you buy your beets in a bunch, keep the greens from the tops for use later. We’ve come up with really great kale and beet leaf slaw that I’ll be posting soon.

Everyone knows that beets bleed. That is to say, they will turn everything red if given the opportunity. To keep all the vegetables in the dish from becoming solid pink, rinse the red beets in cold water with a couple tablespoons of vinegar before you mix the ingredients together. This doesn’t effect the flavor but it is does make the finished product look better.

Ingredients

1 red beet
1 golden beet
4 medium carrots
1 head of garlic (about 10 cloves), cut cloves in half length-wise
1/4 cup of finely chopped fresh rosemary
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
fresh ground pepper to taste (about a teaspoon)
course kosher salt to taste (about a teaspoon)

Here are the beets, carrots and rosemary before we mixed it all together.

Instructions

Heat the oven to 425 degrees
Cut the beets and carrots into bite sized pieces and then mix all ingredients together in a large bowl.
Put the beet and carrot mixture into a baking dish and cover in foil. We also line the baking dish with foil to make it easier to clean up.
Cook 30 minutes at 425 degrees