Any time you turn on the oven to roast or bake something for dinner, ask yourself this question: is there anythingelseyou can slide in the oven at the same time? That will make another dinner faster and easier and better?
The answer to this question is almost always YES. Your weeknight dinners (or lunches or breakfasts) can instantly benefit from a stash of pre-roasted ingredients waiting in your fridge.
My favorite things to sneak in the oven require low-to-no-prep, and always deliver huge payoffs later in the week. Try one or several of these this weekend while you roast a chicken or brisket, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
I'm on aspaghetti squashkick these days. Slice one in half and pop it in the oven one night to use the shredded squash for a Vietnamese-style "noodle" bowl a few days later.
Roasted butternut squash is also always good to have on hand—I like to turn it into almost-instantsoup, and sometimes even toss some into my morning smoothie or oatmeal for sweetness. Slice one in half, invert it in a baking dish, and roast until nicely caramelized and soft.
Canned tomatoes are a wintertime workhorse in my kitchen, when fresh tomatoes are just too sad to eat. I throw them intosoups,braises, andsaucesall season long. But when I remember, I roast them in the oven first,a trick I learned from our special projects editor Adina. It intensifies their flavor and adds nice rich notes of sweet caramelization.
This is seriously the easiest thing you can do: slice the top off a whole head of garlic, drizzle it with some olive oil, wrap it up in foil, and roast it until it's nice and soft. Let it cool, squeeze the flesh out of the skin, and store it in your fridge.
剁碎或捣碎,并添加任何你平常ly add garlic to—but add more of it, you really can't get enough. It's much less pungent than raw garlic, and I love the rich earthy sweetness of it.
I think beets taste better when roasted instead of steamed, but they take a lot longer to cook that way. They take zero prep, though: just wrap them in foil and put on a baking sheet and roast until tender. Make them ahead of time, peel them, and then keep a stash of cooked peeled beets in your fridge.
It's like those prepackaged cooked beets you can buy in the grocery store, but better, and you can add them to cold salads or reheat them as desired throughout the week. They also make another greatalmost-instant soup.
This takes a little more prep work than the above options, but if you have a little extra time while you have your oven on, it's well worth the effort. Chop up any hearty vegetable or root vegetable—broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, parsnips, sweet potatoes, celery root, etc—toss them with some oil and seasoning, and roast away. Pack them into your fridge, and then add them to salads, grain bowls, pasta, frittata, and more throughout the week.
