Oven-Roasted Vegetables, a Must-Have for Effective Weekly Menu Planning

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Mid-week. Hectic day. Kids had sports and piano lessons, suits went to dry cleaners, your dishes are piled up. It’s late in the evening, you still haven’t fed your family, and you just don’t know what to make!

Sound like every week?

That’s how my week always goes.

That is why I am learning that when it comes to sticking to an effective weekly menu plan, doing prep work during my downtime (Sundays, usually) is critical to eating healthy food all week, and not just when it is convenient! If I don’t take the time on Sunday to prepare the staples in advance, I’m miserable all week! I need to have everything at the ready, so my meals cook and are on the table in 30 minutes or less.

This is why I NEED to make sure I have oven-roasted vegetables on hand.

One of my most important staples are my oven-roasted vegetables! I roast two trays of various veggies over the weekend, and then throughout the week, I have veggies always at the ready to toss into my eggs in the morning, into soups, put in marinara sauce for spaghetti, add as a side dish to any meat. So many possibilities.

Any time you need vegetables… bam! There they are, ready for you to easily reheat.

Bonus tip: I even suggest roasting the two trays, but then make sure you set aside even more raw veggies to store away in Ziploc bags to have at the ready during the week. Getting into the habit of stuffing your plate full of extra veggies wherever you can stick them will help so much with satiety with your meals. And having already chopped veggies are a great quick snack idea, when we might not normally choose vegetables because we don’t want to do the prep work for a snack.

There are SO MANY options for roasting veggies! I just pick up a good variety, depending on what is in season at the store.

Red onions, zucchini, green and red bell peppers, rainbow carrots, and mushrooms.

My personal recommendations for oven-roasted vegetables:

• zucchini
• summer squash
• onions
• mushrooms
• tomatoes
• carrots (try rainbow carrots for color!)
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• bell peppers (red, green, and yellow)
• fennel
• Brussels sprouts
• beets
• radishes
• artichoke hearts (you can buy them canned and roast them; delicious!)
• sweet potatoes

… and so many more! Why not try something new?

The thing I love about taking the time to chop all these veggies up at once is that it’s a time for me to just relax. It’s so therapeutic for me to chop vegetable after vegetable on a late Sunday afternoon. I turn on my favorite podcasts to learn something new, and I just enjoy the time to myself. I love it. 

Once you have chopped your vegetables, line the baking sheets with parchment paper
to prevent vegetables from sticking. If you don’t have parchment paper, that is OK. You can just lightly coat your vegetables, or just the baking sheet with a very thin layer of olive oil before roasting.

Parchment paper keeps the vegetables from sticking to he baking sheet. You can coat them in olive oil, but they may not stay as crisp.

I will roast one tray as per the recipe, but the second tray will go under the broiler for one extra minute to get a little bit of those burnt edges. I have a hard time packing the charred vegetables away for the week, because I just want to pick them off the baking sheet and eat them right out of the oven (once they’ve cooled, of course!). They are SO delicious! 

The tray of vegetables on the right were roasted 25 minutes as per recipe, but the tray on the left were put under the broiler an additional minute to give them a little char/burnt edges.

What are your favorite vegetables for roasting? Let me know in the comments!

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