Roots, Bloody Roots: A Recipe by Connoisseur Tom

The dead of winter is upon us here in New England. For a Maine native such as myself that means one thing, time to hit up the root cellar! Ok, I live in a studio apartment, sadly sans root cellar, but that doesn’t mean that the urbanized Northerner has to go without his favorite taproots, bulbs, and tubers. Unfortunately for yours truly, the climate in my apartment is not particularly conducive to the longevity of potatoes, onions, or any other veggie wanting a cool and dry environ to live out its happy little life, so I am forced to use all root veggies usually within a week of purchase. So it goes, unless one of our brave readers out there has a solution for my problem, in which case, drop a brother a line in the forum.

This hearty and simple dish is designed to let the various and sundry veggies bring their own individual flavor to the mix, while enhancing the natural sweetness therein by broiling and thus lightly caramelizing the ingredients.

For this recipe, you will need the following:

4 cloves of garlic (crushed with my handy bigass can of menudo)

1 large onion

3 medium beets

4 potatoes

3 carrots

A healthy amount of black pepper

Olive oil

Red wine

Salt to taste (while it’s hard to over-salt root veggies, it is possible, so don’t go nuts. Also this dish isn’t about salt as much as natural sweetness, so let the tubers play nice.)

Chop all the root veggies into quarters or eighths (depending on size) after scrubbing off the dirt, and in the case of the beets, removing the hairy root and leaf stalks.

Arrange all the veggies, intermingled with the garlic, in a deepish baking pan. Drizzle the whole shebang with olive oil and liberally grind black pepper all about along with a healthy pinch of salt. Preheat the oven to 350 and slide pan in on the top rack, close the door, and walk away for 45 minutes. After the first 45 minutes, open up the oven, inhale deeply, smile, and pour in a quarter bottle of bloody red wine, tilting the pan this way and that to evenly distribute. Turn on the broiler, put the pan in, and let it cook there for 5-10 minutes, depending on how caramelized you want those veggies. Let the pan cool down for 10 minutes and serve yourself a plateful of tasty and nutritious bloody roots.