Do I Have to Eat My Vegetables?!

The hardest thing for us to do is come up with new and exciting ways to prepare vegetables for the menus. Our solution is to find various ways we can bring vegetables together in new and more interesting ways. We take great care to make sure that these medleys fit into our template of what each dish should accomplish. All food must deliver a range of textures when possible and must contain layers of flavors that touch each category of taste we possess; sweet, salty, bitter and sour. This cannot always be achieved; when it can it makes a big difference even if the flavors are very subtle. When you can hit all four tastes every single taste bud is comes alive, and that is the goal.

Our medley for Church Basement Ladies 2 is comprised of more fall and winter related veggies. We start with butternut squash and oven roast it until it is tender, sweet and lightly caramelized. We also oven roast baby carrots.  The baby carrot has a very thin skin so we leave it on to add a very slight bitter taste to go with its nutty-sweet flavor and gentle crunch. We sauté sweet onions until caramelized and deglaze them with white balsamic vinegar to give them a very subtle acetic edge. For color, flavor and even more texture we throw in fresh julienne red bell peppers. Each element of this dish is lightly seasoned with kosher salt and black pepper. This dish also has a mellow buttery flavor achieved by using butternut squash, but only canola oil is used in preparation. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Enjoy this and all the other items on tonight’s menu in good health and we’ll see you next time.

We truly value your being here.

Mark Rohman, Vice President of Culinary and Restaurant Services