Today we welcome another guest blogger: Heather from Cook It Up Paleo. She’s a young little thing who is cooking for her whole family and sharing her recipes along the way! She even came out with her own ebook, Grain-Free Family Favorites!Be sure to check out more of her recipes on her website and get to cookin’! Think about what you were doing when you were a teenager. I sure as hell wasn’t creating recipes for my family. More like stuffing my face with chocolate molten cake from Chili’s. Just a fact. A delicious one.
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Getting our family to eat vegetables has always been a bit of a struggle. I suspect that the “vegetables are gross” stereotype originated in the days when the only way vegetables were ever cooked was boiled until they turned to mush. With lots of hyper-palatable non-foods on the market now, people have lost sight of the way that fresh, properly cooked whole foods actually taste. It’s sad, but it’s a problem that is fixable. I am a firm believer that anyone can enjoy any vegetable as long as it is cooked properly. Roasting vegetables has proved to be a lifesaver when it comes to getting the family to eat veggies. For some reason, even the most vilified vegetables cook up savory and slightly caramelized when roasted. My teenage brother’s eyes literally light up whenever we put roasted brussels sprouts on the table.
This recipe is a celebration of real, whole foods cooked simply. Fresh beets are roasted with carrots, rosemary, butter, and garlic. The result is a sweet and savory vegetable dish that even my beet-hating mother loves. Inspiration for this recipe came from our vacation last summer when we had a greenhouse just a stone’s throw away from the house we were staying in. So we picked some fresh organic roots and roasted them to perfection them with rosemary and butter. Delicious!
Learning to flavor dishes with real, whole foods alone (while switching away from processed spice mixes and such) can be challenging at first. That’s why I also want to share one of the secrets to the art of real food cooking: garlic. Garlic is so delicious, and I add it to pretty much all of my savory dishes. In order to extract maximum flavor from the garlic, you can mash it with a chef’s knife.
To mash garlic: First, get a cutting board, a clove of garlic, some sea salt, and a sharp chef’s knife. Use the flat of the knife to crush the garlic clove. This makes it easy to peel off the skin of the garlic clove. Peel the garlic, then mince the garlic as finely as you can. Now sprinkle salt all over the garlic and let it sit a few seconds. Using a back-and-forth motion with the flat of your knife, mash up the garlic into flavor-packed paste. Done!Tip: If you run your hand along a stainless steel sink, it removes the garlic smell. Try it to believe it.
- 3 cups cubed peeled red beets
- 2 cups cubed peeled carrots
- 3 tablespoons butter or ghee
- 3 garlic cloves, mashed
- ½ teaspoon dried rosemary
- Sea salt, to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Place the beets in a large mixing bowl, and the carrots in a 9 inch by 13 inch glass baking dish. (Mixing the roots separately keeps the carrots from turning pink from beet juice.)
- Place the butter or ghee in a microwave-safe coffee mug and add the garlic. Microwave until the butter is melted. Stir in the dried rosemary.
- Pour half of the melted butter mixture over the beets, and pour half over the carrots. Sprinkle generously with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Toss each of the root vegetables to coat them with the butter mixture.
- Dump the beets into the baking dish with the carrots.
- Roast for 55 minutes, stirring halfway through.
- Serve.
