A TASTY TWIST ON THE USUAL

I love potato salads, especially this one.

ROASTED ROOT VEG AND POTATO SALAD

6 Yukon gold potatoes, diced into large cubes
2 carrots, scrubbed but not peeled, diced into chunky batons
an onion, chopped
a head of garlic broken up and unpeeled
olive oil
one leafy green fennel stalk (for flavoring), save the bulb for another use (I used it for soup.)
very coarse salt and pepper
aged balsamic vinegar

Preheat oven to 350º. Place potatoes, carrots, onion, and garlic in a roasting pan and drizzle generously with olive oil.  Toss.  Sprinkle with coarse salt and grind pepper over.  Lay the fennel stalk on top of veggies.  Cover pan loosely with foil.  Roast covered for 20 minutes then remove foil and roast a further 20-30 minutes. Remove from oven, discard fennel, and then drizzle veggies with balsamic vinegar—not too much—2-3 times around the pan with your thumb over the opening of the bottle so vinegar flows out in a thin stream.  Toss, transfer to serving dish. Devour.

Parsnips, rutabagas, and/or beets would also be very tasty in this, as would a mixture of different colored potatoes.  Fresh parsley to garnish would also be yummy.

Comments

[G]

How interesting that so many parents out there who do not have picky eaters are so shocked that others do. Not only do they seemed shocked, I venture to say that many parents of none-picky eaters almost appear to blame the picky-eater parents for their dilemma. To them, I say (on behalf of myself and the other parents who dread mealtimes), be not so quick to judge. I am the parent of an extremely picky eater. I nursed him for 9 months (I say this for the benefit of the non-picky eater parent camp out there which purports that babies who are breast fed for a long time grow up to eat more varieties of foods...right). Once he was able to start chewing regular food in small pieces, he ate what mommy and daddy ate. I don't know what happened - I feel like it happened overnight. The next thing I knew, I had a child who would have a total fit over tasting something he had (for reasons I have yet to understand) decided he did not like. Meals are accompanied by stress, anxiety, crying, gagging, sometimes even vomiting. To the non-picky eater parent camp which is so sure that a child will not starve himself so just send him to bed hungry and he'll learn to eat what you put in front of him, I say, you don't really know what a picky eater is. For those of you who do, you know that the child would rather just not eat. For those of you in my camp, you know there isn't much help out there, and unfortunately, I don't have much to offer as nothing I've done has gotten us very far. What I can say is that the resources are few and inconsistent...