Sunday, February 21, 2010

Eat Your Veggies!

Do you have a hard time eating all your veggies every day? I sure do. Opening a can of peas or heating up a bag of frozen corn can get a little bland and monotonous to me, so I've found some ways to make vegetables taste really good and the two recipes for vegetables I'm sharing with are ones that I made in the same meal. They are that easy. The first one takes less than 5 minutes to prepare. The second one takes only a few minutes to chop up some veggies and is more a method than a recipe, and can be used with just about any fresh vegetable.

My husband loves spinach and when we ate at an Italian restaurant a few years ago, he had sauteed spinach. The waiter was kind enough to share with us how this dish is prepared and it's so easy that I make it very often for my husband.

Sauteed Spinach


Coat your pan with a couple tablespoons olive oil. Add 1 to 2 cloves of garlic. Turn on the heat to medium high, letting the garlic infuse the oil with it's wonderful flavor. When the garlic starts to sizzle, add your spinach. I use a 10-ounce bag of baby spinach usually.


It seems like there isn't enough room in the skillet for the spinach but it cooks down very quickly. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir it around (I use tongs) until it looks like this:


Only not so blurry LOL

Delicious!

My other favorite way of cooking veggies is roasting and carrots are amazing this way. Again, very few ingredients and yet the flavors develop so well that I could have eaten just the carrots for our meal. So good!

Roasted Carrots

I took 5-6 carrots and cut them up into similar-sized pieces and put them on a baking sheet. I drizzled them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and tossed them with my hands to coat the carrots with the oil. I put them in a 375-degree oven for about 30 minutes, stirring about every 10 minutes, until they look like this:



The vegetables develop their natural sweetness and carmelize into such yumminess. You can do this with just about any vegetable. What I often do when I have several kinds of vegetables that need to be cooked up in the vegetable bin of my refrigerator, I will make mixed roasted vegetables. I use this method with onions, garlic, zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, brussel spouts, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, turnips, etc.


3 comments:

Sandra said...

Those carrots look SO good. I'm definately going to try that!

Sandra said...

I couldn't wait to try these carrots, so I made them for supper tonight. They are SOOOO good!!! My oldest son doesn't care for carrots and he said these are the best I've cooked. We liked the ones that were more done the best, you know with a little black on them. Thanks for posting this!

Lynn said...

I've been meaning to try roasted carrots lately, and seeing this post makes me realize I really really really want to try them! Yum. Looks like a tasty way to get your veggies. Thanks for sharing, DarcyLee