One of the best things I've eaten this year was a meal at
Life Alive, a vegetarian restaurant in Lowell, MA (and they have some other locations in MA). We ate there a few months ago on tour. Reading the menu, I was prepared for a healthy but "crunchy hippie" bowl of vegetables. Well, it was...but it was SO good! I'd gotten their signature "Goddess Bowl" which was beets, broccoli, carrots, kale & tofu over brown rice, with a creamy ginger-miso sauce. I also added avocado and a hard-boiled egg, which upped the deliciousness. What I really liked about it was that all the veggies were cut very small, so you didn't feel like you were chewing huge amounts of plant matter.
The last couple weeks of the CSA have brought a lot of lovely fall root vegetables. I thought I would use the Life Alive dish as inspiration and roast a bunch of these, over black rice for some nice color contrast. The result was a tasty rainbow:
Now...lest you think I am delving into a truly healthy vegetarian lifestyle with this dish...nope. I will still happily devour a greasy patty melt & fries at my local diner, or down a whole box of Kraft Mac & Cheese post-gig (made with half a stick of butter and half & half, no less). But sometimes you need to cleanse. And sometimes you just have A LOT OF FREAKING VEGETABLES you have to use up.
So...here are the players:
Sweet potato, golden beets (I'd actually been hoping for red for the nice color contrast, but golden beets are delicious and don't stain everything they touch), orange cauliflower (fun!), turnips and radishes (which I'm not a fan of raw, but I like them roasted).
Pretty golden beets!
This involved more cutting/prep work than I'm usually game for, but...it was a lazy day off. So I cubed everything very small:
Everything got tossed with olive oil, salt & pepper. And I added Penzey's Turkish Blend to the sweet potatoes & cauliflower. I think some Black & Red ended up somewhere too.
I roasted these on separate baking sheets and was able to do everything in "one batch" between the oven and toaster oven. Temp at 400 and I turned it down a bit after the first 15 minutes. The cauliflower & radishes were done in 15 minutes or less; the sweet potatoes & turnips in about 20-25 and the beets took the longest at about 30. I also turned the broiler on for a couple of minutes to get the beets crispier. Let these all cool for a bit as I was thinking the finished dish would be nice at room temp.
The roasted veggies (beets cooked way down!):
Meanwhile I cooked some black rice (also called Forbidden Rice). This has a nice chewy texture and nutty taste, and it apparently has lots of antioxidants & good stuff in it. I also chopped up some fresh spinach leaves and gave them a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.
To serve, I put the rice in a bowl and mixed the raw spinach into it, which wilted it a bit. Then I put a couple spoonfuls of each veggie on top, and garnished with some goat cheese and Trader Joe's Goddess dressing thinned with a little lemon juice.
Really, really tasty. Would have been even better with some avocado and/or nuts/seeds, but made a nice healthy dinner with plenty of leftovers.
So there's a huge "FrankenStorm" on the way to our area. When I was at Safeway today I thought the one thing I might need in case I have to be holed up in the house for awhile was...Doritos. So y'know, good thing I'm getting the veggies in too.
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