Guest Post: Roasted Beets and Carrots with Rosemary Garlic Butter

Today we welcome another guest blogger: Heather from Cook It Up Paleo. She’s a young little thing who is cooking for her whole family and sharing her recipes along the way! She even came out with her own ebook, Grain-Free Family Favorites! Be sure to check out more of her recipes on her website and get to cookin’! Think about what you were doing when you were a teenager. I sure as hell wasn’t creating recipes for my family. More like stuffing my face with chocolate molten cake from Chili’s. Just a fact. A delicious one.

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Getting our family to eat vegetables has always been a bit of a struggle.  I suspect that the “vegetables are gross” stereotype originated in the days when the only way vegetables were ever cooked was boiled until they turned to mush.  With lots of hyper-palatable non-foods on the market now, people have lost sight of the way that fresh, properly cooked whole foods actually taste.  It’s sad, but it’s a problem that is fixable. I am a firm believer that anyone can enjoy any vegetable as long as it is cooked properly.  Roasting vegetables has proved to be a lifesaver when it comes to getting the family to eat veggies.  For some reason, even the most vilified vegetables cook up savory and slightly caramelized when roasted.  My teenage brother’s eyes literally light up whenever we put roasted brussels sprouts on the table.

This recipe is a celebration of real, whole foods cooked simply.  Fresh beets are roasted with carrots, rosemary, butter, and garlic. The result is a sweet and savory vegetable dish that even my beet-hating mother loves.  Inspiration for this recipe came from our vacation last summer when we had a greenhouse just a stone’s throw away from the house we were staying in.  So we picked some fresh organic roots and roasted them to perfection them with rosemary and butter. Delicious!

Learning to flavor dishes with real, whole foods alone (while switching away from processed spice mixes and such) can be challenging at first.  That’s why I also want to share one of the secrets to the art of real food cooking: garlic.  Garlic is so delicious, and I add it to pretty much all of my savory dishes.  In order to extract maximum flavor from the garlic, you can mash it with a chef’s knife.

To mash garlic: First, get a cutting board, a clove of garlic, some sea salt, and a sharp chef’s knife.  Use the flat of the knife to crush the garlic clove.  This makes it easy to peel off the skin of the garlic clove.  Peel the garlic, then mince the garlic as finely as you can.  Now sprinkle salt all over the garlic and let it sit a few seconds.  Using a back-and-forth motion with the flat of your knife, mash up the garlic into flavor-packed paste.  Done!Tip: If you run your hand along a stainless steel sink, it removes the garlic smell.  Try it to believe it.

Blogger Bio: Heather is a teenage nutrition nerd and enthusiastic chef. She was diagnosed with celiac disease a year ago. She loves to create and photograph new gluten free, paleo recipes for her blog. She has been Paleo since 2012 and loves to educate her friends and family about real food.  She is the author of the ebook Grain-Free Family Favorites.  You can find her blog at www.cookituppaleo.com, or find her on Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus,Instagram, and Twitter.