Roasted Root Vegetables with Blue Cheese Vinaigrette

My schedule has been crazy lately and I’ve been living more or less on take out. It’s amazing how a diet like that leaves me craving vegetables! When I had recent a Saturday all to myself, I knew I wanted to make a “real” meal full of veggies.

Variations on this roasted root vegetable and blue cheese vinaigrette dish have been flying through my head ever since I saw something similar in this month’s issue of Food+Wine. I loved how colorful it was and also how it used both the roots and the greens of the beets. But more than that, I loved how it’s made from ingredients that can be found at the farmer’s market throughout winter – well after the growing season is over.

In typical Lauren fashion, I made a few changes to the original recipe – both because that’s just what I do and to accommodate the ingredients that I could find (the beet selection was lacking and I was craving something stinkier than goat cheese).

The only word I can think of to describe the flavor of the resulting dish is healthy, but I mean that in the best way. The greens taste bitter and cleansing, and roasting the carrots leaves them with an intense sweetness that i love. Parsnips are an often overlooked vegetable, but I loved the peppery flavor that they provide.

This is definitely a dish I’ll be going back to all winter. It’s delicious on its own as a light meal, but also worked well on the side of the roast beef that I served it with. With a few tweaks here and there, I think it could  be interesting over pasta or with brown rice, and maybe even with a sturdy fish like snapper. Ooh, and over soft polenta! The possibilities are endless.

       Print Recipe