Roasted Winter Vegetables

I'm not generally a fan of cold weather, and I'm definitely not a snow girl, but I love this time of year for roasting winter vegetables. Root vegetables might not have that much appeal in and of themselves. I mean, who wants to eat a rutabaga? (Who knows how to even spell rutabaga? I just had to look it up...) Well, I do! As long as it's mixed in with a lot of other vegetables I wouldn't necessary want on their own and roasted in the oven until they start to get that lovely caramelization. Now that's good eats!

What you see here is an assortment of butternut squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, rutabaga, parsnips and onions. I often put turnips in but I didn't see any at the store yesterday. And lest you think this is a lot of work I'll confess to buying the squash and sweet potatoes pre-cut. all I really did was peel a few carrots, parsnips and the rutabaga and cut up a couple of onions. Then I tossed everything in some olive oil I'd drizzled on, added some salt and pepper and my favorite spice blend, and threw it all in the oven at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes.

Now, you might be thinking that's a lot of veggies for just one girl. And it is! But one of my favorite things to do with roasted winter vegetables is to turn them into soup the next day. I'll toss the leftovers in the blender with some chicken stock until it gets to a consistency I like and call it soup - an extremely healthful and tasty soup, I might add.

For tonight, I simply added some spinach and a tilapia filet and called it dinner!