The Most Delicious Roasted Vegetables for Fall

All summer long we live off of salads that makes use of many of our family garden vegetables. But as soon as the weather starts to turn--which in the PNW happens early!--I switch to cooking our family roasted vegetables all fall, winter and spring.  We have roasted vegetables twice per week and use the leftovers for quick healthy lunches paired with lean protein and whole grains.

Here's my absolute favorite way to prepare fall roasted vegetables, and the recipe stars our family favorite vegetable--Brussel sprouts. The Brussel sprouts, beets, carrots, onion and potatoes all cook pretty evenly so are a good mix to roast together.  Sweet potatoes, peppers and broccoli are also great to substitute for some of the other vegetables or feel free to add more or less of certain vegetables, depending what your family loves.  I try to just use what I have on hand in the fridge, pantry or garden.

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I always look to my garden first on what needs to be picked, for this recipe I had tons of carrots and beets to use up!

Start by preheating your oven to 400 degrees.

When dealing with large amounts of vegetable scraps I use my handy dandy oversized "garbage" bowl. It makes it super easy to deal with scraps and toss them into the outside compost.  Usually I just keep a small compost container next to the sink for food scraps, but processing large stems from garden vegetables takes up ALOT of space.

For the roasted vegetables you'll need 2 pounds of Brussels sprouts. I often buy the bagged ones since they're ready to go and already clean.  Open the bag, cut any large Brussels sprouts in half and spread equally between two sheet pans.

Cut up one bunch of beets into approximately 1" chunks and add equally between the two sheet pans. Aren't the inside of home-grown beets gorgeous??

Also cut up 1 large red onion, 1 ½ pounds of carrots, and 1 lb of baby red potatoes. The onion should cut sliced into large sections, the carrots into 1" chunks and the red potatoes get cut in half or quartered (depending on the size). You want all of the vegetables fairly uniform in size so they'll cook equally. Spread the vegetables equally between two pans.

Sprinkle ½ teaspoon pepper and  ½ teaspoon salt over EACH pan of vegetables.

Drizzle EACH  pan with ¼ c olive oil and mix the vegetables to evenly coat them all.

I'll sometimes add dried herbs but it's totally optional. If you want extra seasoning, I suggest ¼ teaspoon rosemary and ¼ thyme to each pan. Mix in. How yummy does this look so far??

Place both pans in the oven and bake for 25 minutes.

This is what they'll like after 25 minutes.

Stir the vegetables and you can see the bottom is already starting to brown.

Rotate the pans so what you had on the upper rack before is now on the lower rack and vice versa with the other pan.  Cook the vegetables for 20 more minutes and they should be tender on the inside and crispy on the outside! Delicious!!

Yumm! These are so good, it's hard not to eat the whole pan. When you roast Brussels sprouts, they caramelize and lose the bitterness many of us probably remember from the boiled Brussels sprouts we were served as kids!  After 40 minutes the vegetables will be "done" but not sweet and caramelized. Keep roasting them until nice and brown to bring out the best flavor.

I added fresh sprigs of rosemary and thyme to garnish the dish before serving.

These me would also be perfect with a holiday meal like Thanksgiving or Christmas, but why wait? You can enjoy them every week just like we do 🙂