The happiness associated with roast vegetables

Now, we had the full roast chicken dinner tonight, but I won't bore you with the chicken part of this because, I realise, I'm forever giving you recipes for roast chicken. So...I'll focus on the roast potatoes and parsnips and say that I'd be happy to have them all on their own, or with all kinds of other dishes. I'm speaking of potatoes roasted with whole garlic cloves and parsnips --roasted in a separate dish.

You could serve your parsnips and potatoes with a simple omelette, or with a pie of some sort --cold or hot - to cheer up some cold meat or to eat with some cheese. Sometime, I'll even cook a big dish of roast potatoes to have with salad and cheese. I favour them with Wensleydale or Cheshire cheese, perhaps.

Anyway, to make excellent roast potatoes, you should really peel and parboil. Take them to the point when their edges are roughened up, but their centre is still firm, then drain and give them a good shake. Then into hot fat and cook in a hot oven for forty to forty five minutes, perhaps shaking them once. Your fat of choice might be sunflower oil or another bland oil or perhaps some dripping if you have roasted a joint. Or, best of all, goose fat. Tonight --as with the parsnips that follow-- I cooked them in the fat and juices from the chicken when it was about three quarters cooked.

You could be really lazy about it and just give the spuds a good clean, don't bother to peel and then do the same. They would still be delicious but not, I think, ever quite so sublime. When I add garlic, it may be peeled but more often than not I just throw in whole unpeeled cloves. You can squeeze out that golden paste when all is done or just pick them up and eat them, skin and all. They will be sticky and sweet.

Now those parsnips. Here, you cannot get away without peeling. Another thing is that you need to try and avoid the really huge ones because they may be inclined to get a bit woody. Some people core them; I never bother, unless they are really ancient and I have forgotten about them. So, top and tail, cut them in half and just slide them straight into hot fat. Some recipes add honey. I feel that parsnips are so naturally sweet (there was a reason why they were substituted for bananas in recipes of wartime Britain and its subseqent period of austerity), that any sweetening is guilding the lily.

So, cook the parsnips, turning once, for about half an hour and then out they come. They will be burnished and quite sticky and caramelised at the edges and I will always eat one before the dish gets to the table!

By the way, for the best evocation of the joys of the roast potato, you might want to look at Nigel Slater's writing. I also just read his description in Easy Living Magazine of happiness being that last roast potato. I concur.

http://www.nigelslater.com/home.asp 

http://www.easylivingmagazine.com/

The rest of our dinner happened to be a roast chicken, which tonight I had stuffed with a sage and onion stuffing, carrots, broccoli and no gravy. We just poured the remainder of the chicken's juices over our potatoes. As I've said before, if you roast your chicken properly --I always say breast down for at least the first half hour-- you don't need anything to moisten it.

BUT I would have been happy with the potatoes and their friendly cloves of garlic plus the parsnips, salt and pepper and a little English mustard.

Thanks to Alexbrn over at Flickr for the photo. Wish I had time to photograph everything I cooked!