Roasted Autumn Salad with Herbed Oil and Goat Cheese
November 8, 2022
Roasted Autumn Salad with Herbed Oil and Goat Cheese
This simple, delicious, satisfying and GORGEOUS roasted autumn salad of apples, turnips, carrots, beets, and fennel will dazzle your taste buds and make you abandon that green bean casserole altogether.
In a blender or food processor, add lemon zest, juice of half a lemon (sans seeds), fresh tarragon and chives and s+p and blend until the herbs are teeny tiny and the oil has turned bright green. Put in the fridge while you’re cooking the veg so the flavors can get to know one another a bit better. If you can make this a day ahead, even better.
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
Chop your veg to be about the same size, roughly 1-2 inch chucks. Peel the carrots and beets. Keep the skin on the apple. You don’t need to peel the fennel or leeks, just chop off the trees that’re growing out of them.
Add carrots, leek and fennel on one side of a large roasting pan and the beets on the another. Drizzle all your fruit and veg with olive oil (give it a good coat) and season with salt and pepper and herbs de Provence. Toss it up good and make sure they are in a single layer in the pans and not laying all over each other, again keeping the beets separate.
Roast in the center rack of the oven for 20 minutes, then remove from the oven, add your apples, toss (with all but the beets) and roast for an additional 20 minutes.
In the meantime, toast your pistachios in a dry pan over medium high/high heat, moving around often to prevent burning. Once they've got some color, remove and roughly chop. If you opted to buy a whole pomegranate, it's time to cut that baby open and get the seeds out.
Once the veg (and apples) are golden brown and tender (but not mushy!) remove from oven, toss with your herb oil and plate, finish with your toasted pistachios, pomegranate arils and dollops of soft, fresh goat cheese and enjoy!
Notes
Chop the beets last or on a separate cutting board so they don’t stain the rest of the veg. so they don’t bleed all over everything. As mentioned in the instructions, you can also keep them on one side of your sheet pan when roasting and can toss them with the herbed oil separately for the same reason. Beets are good but they bleed more than anyone in the Halloween movies. Any of them.
If you are making this in advance, squeeze some lemon juice on the apples to prevent them from turning brown.
If it’s impossible to make one layer of your produce without crowding the pan, then you’ve got too much on your sheet pan. Your food will steam, not brown. Brown food is good. So, get a bigger pan.
I'm a big eater, a huge fan of pasta (and mac n cheese), and I'm on a mission to prove that indulgence and balance can exist well together without silly restrictions or dieting. Life's too short to eat bad food!
