Roast vegetables with rosemary

Kaja’s showing off her ability to make a primitive dish. See for yourselves. Though what those snide remarks about potatoes at the end are for, I’d like to know…

“My mum sometimes makes this dish (Kaja’s mum, not mine. Just for the record, my mum makes chicken rolls 😉 – a note from Prymitywna Kuchnia) for Sunday lunch. I recently hosted the opening barbecue of the season. The house rule was ‘you eat what you bring…’ – yes, I know, I didn’t feel like doing much this time. And since some of my visitors were vegetarians, naturally they lugged vegetables along, and by the kilo too. They ate some, and some (a lot) were left. I decided to turn the leftovers into lunch for the next few days. And that’s how I ended up choosing this particular dish to use up the vegetable reserves in my kitchen. That qualifies as ‘primitive’, surely? It’s even a ‘one-pot’ dish! It just takes quite a long time in the oven.

For me it’s a meal in itself. But it also makes an ideal side for the rest of your dinner – meaning the meat, obviously. You can roast potatoes with the vegetables too, to make it more substantial.”

At a glance: 

Prep time: 15 minutes

Roasting time: 1.5 hours

Oven temperature: 200 degrees Celsius

Serves: I find this sort of estimate tricky. As usual, make as much as you want to eat. I filled a whole big roasting tin. (Kaja ate her way through it over a week, so it might do for one lunch for two – a note from Prymitywna Kuchnia.)

Calories: zero, it’s vegetables, after all (I see Kaja’s finally learnt something from Prymitywna Kuchnia – a note from Prymitywna Kuchnia)

Ingredients, whatever takes your fancy (sic!):

• Oyster mushrooms
• 2 peppers
• 3 onions
• 3 carrots
• A beetroot
• Button mushrooms
• 2 courgettes
• An aubergine
• 5 cloves of garlic
• 2 tablespoons dried or fresh rosemary (mine was somewhere in between, because my fresh rosemary dried out all by itself 🙂 )
• A tablespoon of salt
• Olive oil – about 4 tablespoons

Kaja’s mum’s recipe for vegetables with rosemary:

Wash all the vegetables except the mushrooms (mine were already washed, because the vegetarians had washed them for their skewers) and prep them: peel the ones that need peeling (carrots, onions, garlic), cut the stalks and seeds out of the peppers and trim the ends off the aubergine, beetroot (I’d peel the beetroot too, but who knows what she’s thinking – a note from Prymitywna Kuchnia) and courgettes. Cut all the vegetables into medium pieces. Mine were about the size of my thumb. Halve the garlic cloves. Put everything in a roasting tin, drizzle with the oil, sprinkle with salt and rosemary and toss until it’s all coated with the seasonings and oil.

Now just pop the tin in the preheated oven at 200 degrees Celsius for about 1.5 hours. It might need longer. After an hour, start testing the beetroot and carrot with a fork to see if they’re tender.

All done! Enjoy!