Monday nights are my dinner night. I cook for the other six people who I live with, and in exchange I am served dinner for the rest of the week. It's a nice arrangement. Cooking dinner for seven isn't easy, though. And while my roommates stick to the stuff that makes sense for feeding a huge house, I tend to make kind of complicated dishes. Given the fact that I've only been cooking from scratch for a year, this can be difficult. I've been making these dinners since January, when I moved in, and last night was the first time I felt like "shit, I've got this." I made a vegan cheese sauce in five minutes. I tended to the stuff in the oven as well as the three pots on the stove. And dinner was only fifteen minutes late.
My favorite feeling is the one you get when you're finally starting to get the hang of something you always thought to be difficult. It's super exciting when this feeling comes sooner than expected (like, whoa, brewing kombucha is incredibly easy, and so is playing the ukulele), but it's also pretty exciting to see hard research and practice finally pay off after months and months or years and years of working on it. I've learned enough about food to cook without recipes sometimes, and I know that if I'm out of baking powder, all I need is baking soda and cream of tartar. Making dinner for seven? Sure. No big deal.
The highlight of last night's dinner: Sweet Roasted Vegetables. They're covered in cinnamon, ginger, and maple syrup. So they're kind of like french toast vegetables.
Sweet Roasted Vegetables
Ingredients:2 lbs. Root vegetables (I used carrots, parsnip, celeriac, and turnips)
2 lbs. Potatoes
10 cloves of garlic
Olive Oil
Maple Syrup
Cinnamon
Fresh Ginger
Directions: Set your oven to 400° F.
Cut the ends off of a bunch of root vegetables. Dice the roots so that the wedges are about 3/4 of an inch. Peel as much garlic as you think you can handle. Leave these whole. Cut potatoes into one inch wedges.
Oil a pan with olive oil and then drop in all of your vegetables. Cover them in olive oil; make sure they're drenched. Grate some fresh ginger and place it in the pan. Drizzle maple syrup over the whole thing, and sprinkle some cinnamon on top.
The vegetables need 35-45 minutes in the oven, and they should be turned over after twenty minutes. They're done when you can stick a fork through them.
I'm feeling awfully domestic, so I think I'm going to go balance myself out with some basketball.
