I invented this dish this evening and everyone liked it; a hearty and fairly-healthy comfort-food vegetable dish.
Ingredients ·
Two medium-sized leeks
Two pretty-big carrots
One fat parsnip
Quite a bit of butter
Hard Italian cheese to grate
Almond meal (I went looking in the pantry for breadcrumbs and came up empty but ran across this; I think breadcrumbs would have worked just fine.)
Garlic salt
Method ·
Peel the carrots and parsnip then chop them up pretty small, small enough to stir-fry.
Melt some butter in a cast-iron frying pan, hot enough that the butter is bubbling but not smoking, toss in the carrots and parsnips and stir them around until they’re fairly buttery.
Clean and chop the leeks while the carrots and parnsip sauté. Cleaning leeks is non-trivial because there’s often sand and dirt trapped inside. Look it up online if you haven’t done this before. I composted both the dark-green and stark-white ends in the interests of a pleasant light-green coloration.
After the carrots and parsnip have had about ten minutes in the pan, add the leeks. You may need a bit more butter; mix it all up once again.
On impulse, I sprinkled the whole thing with a bit of nice olive oil.
Then I sprinkled it with garlic salt. It would probably have been more sincere to have tossed sliced or crushed garlic in with the initial butter.
After the leeks have been in for about five minutes, sprinkle a thin layer of almond meal across the top, then grate some cheese on top of that.
Another five minutes and you’re done.
It served four. I wish I’d taken a picture, it looked great in the black iron frying pan.
Use vegetable oil instead of butter and you’ve got a vegan treat. But not quite as good I bet.
The big variable is probably the cooking temperature. Where I had it, the veggies at the bottom were just a bit blackened and extra tasty. Maybe a bit hotter would have been tastier.
We had this with spuds and bratwurst and a dark winter ale from Howe Sound Brewing, and it all fit together wonderfully. A good start to the longest night of the year.
