Roasted baby vegetables with olive butter and feta

Roasting baby vegetables has never been so tasty, a great side dish as well as a main or starter, this can be used in so many ways.

Using olive butter in particular (as well as many other forms of homemade favoured spreads) to enhance the sweetness of vegetables is an old culinary trick.  But this works particularly well in this recipe as this also provides a further use for roasted tomatoes - also naturally sweet when roasted.

 

·         Take 150 grams each of baby leeks, carrots and fennel.   Top, tail (if necessary) and cut lengthways
·         100 grams of roasted tomatoes
·         Three good dessert spoons of olive butter
·         75 grams of feta, crumbled

Pre-heat your oven to 200c.

Place your baby vegetables on an oiled oven tray and place in the oven for about 10 minutes.  Then take this out and add your olive butter, tossing the vegetables before returning them to the oven, reducing the heat slightly to 190c, for a further 15-20 minutes.

Toss the vegetables again and then add the tomatoes and feta evenly over the top and bake for a further 5 minutes or so (remember the tomatoes only need to heat through).

The result is a rather sexy, savoury/sweet experience, which is really good served as a starter with toast, served with penne or lentils or with grilled fish or meat.

Summer in March? Receipe to Oz - Feta salad

Just sent this to Sue in Oz. It reminded me that you can always have Summer... and talking lentils and feta is always a good way to start...

Puy lentils (they call them "French Style" in Oz);

For 250 grams of lentils:

o 4 medium/2 large onions
o 4 large capsicums (how southern hemisphere am I?)
o 6 large cloves of garlic or one small bulb
o 2 generous sized teaspoons of smoked sweet paprika
o 2 "normal" sized teaspoons of either ground cumin or ground coriander (or one of each).
o Veg or chicken stock.

o Sweat onions first, then add garlic and capsicums together, sweat, then lentils, then dried spices. Five minutes covered, then the stock (to 1 cm above the mixture).
o At the end of cooking along with the feta, dried oregano or marjoram (same thing but one's wild, one's cultivated, apparently) to taste - for a the traditional fare.
o Otherwise, as I've done - which is I think what you would have had at our parties, 250 grams of rough chopped parsley mixed through whilst warm (it doesn't get cooked - just wilts in the mixture) and then covered until almost cool, and then the feta on top.
o Additional bits and pieces if in a spicy mood - one good sized medium chilli (finely chopped) and 4 cm stick of ginger (grated) - gives it a little kick.

I don't think I've forgotten anything. Although I've now tried the above with wild rice as well (half wild and half brown actually) and the mixture works great with smoked fish and green capsicums - same quantities.