Baked vegetables with aioli dip

This is perhaps one of the most simple and least spectacular dishes on the planet but I just wanted to show you because it looks so pretty and tastes soooooo delicious.

I used onion squash, parsnips, carrots, leek and onions but it works just as well with other vegetables like beetroots, celeriac, potatoes, sweet potatoes, aubergine, pumpkin... The list ist endless.

Don't you just love the colours? It just looks so... ...autumny! (Is that a word? 'Autumny'? I don't think so, I think it's 'autumnal'. But 'autumny' sounds just so much nicer, don't you agree?)

The aioli dip was very good, too, but a bit too garlicky for my taste. I suppose one large or two smallish cloves would suffice (I used two large ones).

 

I wanted to give you a better picture of the dish on the plate but at the moment I suffer from the same problem as many other food bloggers: Most of the day I'm in class or studying which means I rarely or never cook at lunchtime but do my big cooking in the evenings. Problem: By now, it gets dark around 6:00 p.m. and I never start cooking before 6:30. So most nights all the natural light has gone by the time my supper is ready. And as you know, pictures taken in artificial light either have a lot of image noise or a horrible yellowish tint, both of which you can't satisfactorily remove, not even with the aid of the almighty Photoshop (well, professionals might be able to, but I am not). To avoid this problem, Christina from the wonderful German blog Feines Gemüse has taken to photographing directly under a lamp while covering the flash with white paper to keep the picture from getting too bright. I tried that, too, but unfortunately it didn't work for me... The search for a solution goes on.

Baked vegetables with aioli dip

Serves 1 hungry person

Ingredients

Use whatever (autumn) vegetables you have lying around (see above). I had:

1/4 onion squash

1 leek

1 red onion

2 medium-sized carrots

2 parsnips

Olive oil

2 branches of rosemary

2 egg yolks

1 tsp mustard

200 ml/7 oz olive oil

1 large or 2 small cloves of garlic, crushed

1 dash of balsamic vinegar

Sunflower seeds 

Preheat the oven to 190° C/375° F. 

Quarter the onion and cut the other vegetables into chunks. Mince the rosemary. Put the vegetables and the rosemary into a medium roasting tin and drizzle them with olive oil. Pop them into the oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on how crispy you want the veggies to be.

In a medium bowl, combine the egg yolks and the mustard. Then add the olive oil drop by drop, whisking steadily and quickly the entire time. It is very important that you don't add too much or all of the olive oil at once because if you do, the mixture won't thicken.

When you added all the olive oil, keep whisking for a few seconds, then add the crushed garlic and the vinegar and season to taste.

When the vegetables are done, put them on a plate and sprinkle the sunflower seeds on top (I wanted to roast them in soy sauce first but am an idiot and forgot).

Dip the vegetables into the aioli. Enjoy.

I had about 1/3 of the aioli left over. You can either keep it in the fridge for a few days and use it up when you make baked vegetables again (it works just as well with chips/fries or steamed vegetables, especially artichokes) or you can just smear it on buttered bread. It is terrific with the soda bread that I made a few days ago, forgot to post about and have almost eaten up by now. I'll make a new one next week and write a post on it. Promise.