This Week's In-Season Recipe: My Roots Are Showing

Roots, roots, roots.  Beets, potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, radishes...  It's mostly what sustains the in-season, traditional consumer throughout the winter and early spring months.  Roots are yummy, but at the end of the season, right before the abundance of summer harvesting explodes, I flinch a little when peeking inside the week's CSA box to see more of them.  But then... it is a challenge to find new ways to stuff them down my family's throats with minimal complaining.  And I  do love a good challenge...  Tonight, the challenge was won, and I even managed to get some of those amazingly nourishing leafy greens down their hatches.  Hallelu.  To explain my somewhat random cooking method, in order to keep as much nutrition each food has to offer in tact, I like to heat them as minimal as possible.  Throwing the kale and radishes in at the end not only gave this dish a nice, fresh crispness, it also yielded the dish with more vitamins and enzymes.  Hooray!  We ate this as a main dish, but I suppose it'd be considered more of a side dish.  I guess you could call it a sort of an Italian ratatouille, but I decided to name it:

1-Skillet Italian Roots & Sweet Sausage

3 potatoes

2 carrots

1 beet

1 onion (or several young ones)

3 garlic cloves, seeded
1 10-oz package sweet Italian sausage (preferably nitrate-free, of course), sliced

4 Tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 Tablespoon Italian seasoning

4 kale leaves

3 radishes

1 jar marinara sauce

2/3 cup Parmesan cheese

Heat oven to 400 degrees.  Coat a 10-inch cast iron skillet with half of the olive oil.

First, I like to prepare all the veggies by peeling and chopping off their ends so they're all ready to go down the food processor shoot. Off to the compost pile it goes...

Use the slicer blade on the food processor to slice the potatoes, beet, & carrots.

Throw them all in the skillet.  Change the processor blade to the mincer and mince the garlic and onions.  Toss those into the skillet, along with the sausage, Italian seasoning and the rest of the olive oil.  Mix it all around.

{I like this kind of seasoning (all good ingredients).}

Cover and bake for 45 minutes to one hour. In the meantime, chop the radishes and de-stem and chop the kale.  I cleaned up the dishes and the kitchen with the rest of the time, then out came the delicious-smelling roots!  Add the radishes, kale, and marinara sauce.

Top with cheese.

The potatoes were crispy on the edges and soft in the middle.  The kale was crisp.  The flavors blended perfectly.  We will be making this one again for sure.  The end.

~Browse more riddlelove recipes here.~

I'm sharing this at Tuesday Night Supper Club & Traditional Tuesday.