Roast Vegetables

Roasting pulls the water out of vegetables and concentrates their flavor. Try tasting a roasted carrot next to a boiled carrot and you'll see how roasting emphasizes the vegetable's natural sweetness.

Roasting works best for root vegetables, such as carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions and for vegetables that contain a great deal of moisture such as tomatoes and mushrooms. You can also coat these softer vegetables with bread crumbs to add texture, as in a gratin.

Sometimes you'll want to roast root vegetables in their skins like russet potatoes because we like to eat the skins, beets because they bleed and dry out once they're peeled, and baby vegetables because their thin skins are entirely edible. But usually we roast vegetables that have been peeled beforehand. Cut the peeled vegetables into sections or wedges, or turn them, and then lightly coat with olive oil or melted butter to prevent them from drying out in the oven.

Vegetables can be roasted alone or in combination. Most of the time, all you need to do to roast vegetables is to slide them into the oven and turn them over from time to time so they brown evenly. A nice touch, however, is to pour a little good meat or chicken broth into the roasting pan about ten minutes before the vegetables are done. The broth quickly reduces in the heat of the oven and glazes the vegetables.