Vegetarian Version:
My version serves ten. Most of you’d need to reduce it. You also do not have to use the vegetables below, and I have a photograph and another version further below:
vegetable cooking spray
2 lbs. winter squash such as hubbard, butternut, or acorn: peel, seed, cut into two inch chunks
4 large carrots, sliced
2 small parsnips, sliced
4 medium Potatoes, unpeeled, halved, sliced
4 medium onions, cut into wedges
4-5 cups cooked Great Northern beans
4-5 cups cooked pinto beans
1 Tbs. dried basil leaves
1 tsp. dried thyme leaves
1 cup mixed dried fruit, cut into large pieces
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. white wine vinegar
3 Tbs. olive oil
1 cup parsley
Line large jelly roll pan with aluminum foil; spray with cooking spray. Combine fresh vegetables and beans on pan; spray generously with cooking spray, sprinkle with herbs and toss. Bake uncovered at 425°F until vegetables are tender, about 30 minutes, adding dried fruit the last 5 minutes Spoon vegetable into bowl. Mix vinegar and oil; drizzle over vegetables, add parsley and toss. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
This is sooo yummy. We used diced dried apricots for the fruit because we had some, but raisins would work, too. I’ve also tried it with balsamic vinegar, and it was delicious.
I’ve also made it in my electric roaster for potlucks.
Linked at My Meatless Mondays
——————————————————————————————–
NONVEGETARIAN:
If you don’t want a vegetarian dish, this is good with sausage or other kinds of pork.
Here’s another version we made in early September using vegetables from our garden, from the organic farm near my daughter’s house, and herbs and spices from my co-op:
For this we used:
4 Kohlrabi grown naturally on the farm near the HG’s house, peeled and put through the french fry cutter on my Bosch Food Processor
Two huge summer squash grown by my neighbor, peeled and put through the Bosch.
Half an onion because it was in the fridge, also put through the Bosch. I do not recall the provenance of the onion;-)
half a bag of organic baby carrots, because they were in the fridge
two eggplants from the natural farm near the HG- we put these through the food processor, then soaked them in salt water for several hours, drained them well, pressed them in a colander to get more water out, and then added them to the other vegetables
A bunch of potatoes purchased in a fifty pound bag and split with a friend. We bought them at an Amish bulk foods store on a long day trip where we also bought nitrate free beef bacon from grass fed cows, beef hearts for .89 a pound, undyed cheeses, ground beef from grass fed cows, and other delightful goodies.
The potatoes were an obscenely low price- I don’t remember exactly any more, but the fifty pound bag was in the neighborhood of what we’d usually pay for a 20 pound bag.
I think we used ten potatoes because we were feeding, um, let me think, around a dozen people. The potatoes we popped into a bowl of cold water as soon as they were cut, as potatoes oxidize quickly once their innards are exposed to the air.
Just before we popped the pans into the oven we added some cheap sausage.
In a very large bowl (the old Tupperware Thatsa Bowl
, which holds 42 cups), I put olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I am afraid I did not measure, I just eyeballed and tastetested. I would guess it was about 1 1/2 cups of oil and half that of vinegar, but no promises.
Then I went through the spice cupboard and added:
Rosemary (ground in the coffee mill I use for spices and herbs)
Thyme
Oregano
Parsley
garlic
onion powder
sea salt
pepper from the Philippines (Jenny brought it back on her trip there)
Again- I just eyeballed it all, and sniffed it, and sometimes chose just because there were only, say, 3 tablespoons left of one spice, and I saw no point in using two instead of finishing off the bottle.
I whisked this mixture up.
Then we put the cut vegetables in the oil, put the lid on the bowl and shook it vigoursly to make sure everything got coated in oil.
We got out our biggest pans (four about like the one above), because you want the vegetables to be single layers.
We put them under the broiler (I am blessed to have a double oven) and roasted them at 400 for about 40 minutes. They were good, but next time we will add the Kohlrabi and carrots first and give them a head start on the other vegetables. The potatoes were perfect, the squash and eggplant perhaps just a tiny bit softer than optimum, but it was all still utterly delicious, even though there are a couple people who think this would be perfect with just potatoes, carrots, and sausage.=)
The point of listing the crunchy credentials of our foods above is not to be pretentious about the provenance of our food. But this meal cost less than ten dollars and made enough to feed 14 or more people, so it more than falls within the ‘Five Dollar Challenge’ offered by the Slow Food Movement for September 17th, That challenge is, um, five dollars per person, not the usual five dollar per meal or less target most of our readers must manage.
