Roasted garlic

Roasted garlic is one of the most beautiful things on earth, and tasty too. I love it how the garlic fragrance fills the whole house during the roasting and how butter smooth the ready article is.

Roasted garlic is not hard to make. Just cut off the top of the head of the garlic. You can also remove some of the papery outer layers. Pour olive oil on the top, close in a foil parcel and roast for about 40 minutes until the garlic is very soft.

I have recently added roasted garlic to many dishes, some of them already posted here and probably many more to come.

I'm very sorry about the brief post, but I am just absolutely knackered today. This week can only get better. I hope that you are having a good week though!

Your VegHog

Roasted root vegetables

Roasted root vegetables are always a good side dish choice for a heavy, festive dinner. You can use any of your favourite root vegetables or squashes etc. I chose potatoes, parsnips, carrots and shallots this time.

These are the three separate roasting tins I made to make this dish:

1)

3 large potatoes

Olive oil

Paprika

Salt

2)

3 parsnips

3 large carrots

Olive oil

Thyme

Salt

Chop the vegetables into lengthy sticks, approximately to similar sizes.

Roast them brushed with olive oil and seasoned at 180C for about one hour.

The roasting time can vary depending on the oven performance and the thickness of the vegetables. Just check when the vegetables are soft and have brown roasting marks. Then they are good to go.

3)

3 small shallots

Olive oil

Peel the shallots and brush them with olive oil. Roast them under foil. Remove the foil only about 10 minutes before the end in case the shallots haven't browned enough.

Here I just served a cheese sauce and salad on the side.

What are your favourite roasted root vegetables? And do you usually have them at Christmas?

Roasted cauliflower slices

For a long time now I've kept seeing lovely images of roasted cauliflower slices, and really wanted to try such a dish. Then I detected a recipe for Cauliflower cheese steaks in Erin Gleeson's The Forest Feast (p. 148-149) and was finally convinced to try. Last week I noticed that my favourite pasta cheese had returned to stock in my local supermarket after a long absence, and this was a great dish to use it on. Obviously I'll now be making loads of pasta again as well.

At some point in the future I will follow the recipe in The Forest Feast, as that looked absolutely amazing. Here is how I made my roasted cauliflower slices in the end, a bit more basic version.

1 cauliflower

2 tbsp olive oil

½ tsp sea salt

10 g vegetarian pasta cheese

Cut the cauliflower into thin slices and grate the cheese.

Roast the cauliflower slices at 180C for about 20 minutes.

Sprinkle the grated cheese on top of them and roast for further 5 minutes until the cheese has melted.

Serve as a side dish to roast dinners etc. These are so tasty that I would sometimes just have them as a snack on their own.

Your VegHog