This week, I roasted vegetables for the first time. One might think that, as a vegetarian for over 10 years, I would have tackled this basic cooking style before now. But I hadn’t; I typically sauté or stew or steam. Truthfully, I never used the oven much for cooking. Baking, yes. Cooking, that I did on the stovetop.

Enter the farm share, and the aforementioned bags and bags of turnips. Lovely little gold and purple turnips. It seemed a shame to boil them and then pour all that vitamin water down the drain. Plus, roasting with olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary sounded a lot more appetizing.

The first challenge was finding a suitable dish. I have three rectangular glass/pyrex baking dishes, a round and lidded glass/pyrex casserole dishes, and a square and lidded glass/pyrex casserole dish. I wasn’t keen on using any of these, but we don’t have a roasting pan (since I don’t, well, eat roasts). Then I remembered the terrine we acquired in Switzerland, ten years ago now. It wasn’t exactly right, as we weren’t able to spread the turnips (and chunks of onion, and cloves of garlic) into a single layer, but with checking in and tossing everything around periodically it turned out decently. Some of the turnips were overly soft, but we mixed in two kinds plus larger chunks of rutabaga, so that could have contributed to the uneven result. All in all, tasty enough to repeat.

Coincidentally, we initiated this roasting venture during the same week that I was trotting around to different stores comparing pots and pans. We need to replace our main over-sized frying pan (the nonstick stuff has bitten the dust, as happens), and we’re trying to create a matrix of cost, utility and quality that will guide us to the single most useful replacement pan, but that’s a topic for another day. As a result of all this hanging out in cookware sections, I came across and snapped up three stoneware dishes more suitable for roasting: a rectangular one, a shallow oval one, and a medium-deep oval one (all of which were of discontinued colors or styles or something that led to them being dramatically less expensive).

Tonight, then, we successfully roasted our turnip dinner in less time, with a more even result, in a dish that allowed for all the pieces to stay in a single layer. Huzzah!