May 17, 2012

Gathering the winter garden harvest recently, I looked in my basket and saw many of the vegetable ingredients for a traditional New England boiled dinner: beets, carrots and parsnips. Since I prefer roasted to boiled vegetables and less meat rather than more, I decided to do a California take on this traditional New England meal. (Bi-coastal moment)

Added to the vegetables above, I retreived a partial head of red cabbage from the refrigerator, potatoes, onions and garlic on hand and some lean pieces of ham frozen from Easter dinner. I had the ingredients for my New England roasted dinner. Here’s how I prepared it.

First, I have to admit I’ve not seen garlic or olive oil in a recipe for New England boiled dinner and I’ve substituted parsnips for turnips, not to mention swapping about four ounces of diced ham for four pounds of corned beef. I won’t even speak of the purple carrots. Remember, this is only a California take on the New England boiled dinner.

So I cut the potatoes, parsnips, onions into chunks and added purple and orange carrots with “3D diagonal cuts.” With olive oil sufficient to coat, minced garlic, salt and pepper, the tray of vegetables roasted at 400 degrees in my convection oven. 

I doused the beet chunks with more olive oil and roasted them on a separate tray so they wouldn’t color the other vegetables.

While the vegetables roasted, I sliced the red cabbage and put in a large pan atop the stove. I added the roasted beets and cooked them together briefly until the cabbage began to soften. The other tray of roasted vegetables were combined along with the ham and the whole was lightly tossed together and heated to serving temperature.

And here we have New England Roasted Dinner.

Today’s post is linked to Thursday’s Kitchen Cupboard, hosted this week by Spring Garden Acre.