Part III: BUILDING - Creating New Patterns
Chapter 7: The Art of Simplicity
Recipe 7: Perfect Roasted Vegetables (Any Season)
Real food is simple, and delicious. When you start with ingredients that are alive—vegetables that still carry the energy of the soil they grew in, herbs that release their essential oils when you crush them between your fingers—you don't need to manipulate them much to create something extraordinary. The art is in restraint: good salt that enhances rather than overwhelms, olive oil that carries heat evenly, timing that respects the natural rhythms of transformation. When you master the simple technique of roasting vegetables—that ancient alchemy of heat and time that concentrates flavors and creates new compounds—you have a template that can adapt to any season, any mood, any craving. This is how you build a sustainable relationship with healthy eating: not through complicated rules, but through simple practices that become second nature.
Chapter 7: The Art of Simplicity
Recipe 7: Perfect Roasted Vegetables (Any Season)
"Real food is simple, and delicious."
The Paradox of Abundance
We live in a time of unprecedented access to recipes, cooking techniques, exotic ingredients, and kitchen gadgets. You can watch YouTube videos that teach you to fold dumplings like a master chef, order ingredients from across the globe with the click of a button, and equip your kitchen with tools that would have amazed professional cooks just a generation ago.
Yet somehow, in the midst of all this culinary abundance, many of us have lost the ability to make simple food taste extraordinary.
Real food is simple, and delicious. When you start with ingredients that are alive—vegetables that still carry the energy of the soil they grew in, herbs that release their essential oils when you crush them between your fingers—you don't need to manipulate them much to create something extraordinary.
The art is in restraint: good salt that enhances rather than overwhelms, olive oil that carries heat evenly, timing that respects the natural rhythms of transformation. This isn't about limitation—it's about understanding that the most profound flavors often come from the most basic techniques, executed with attention and care.
The Lost Language of Simplicity
Our great-grandmothers didn't have thirty different spice blends in their pantries or fifteen different cooking oils to choose from. They had salt, pepper, maybe a few dried herbs, some good fat for cooking, and the wisdom to know how to coax maximum flavor from minimal ingredients.
They understood something we've forgotten: that the best cooking isn't about adding complexity—it's about revealing the inherent goodness that already exists in real food.
What I love about this approach is the simple magic of a roasted vegetable: cooked around 375°F, with olive oil and lots of good salt, cooked until the edges get crispy and caramelized. Add some good meat on the plate for a full meal, and the meat juices run onto the veggies for incredible flavor.
The Broccoli Revelation
My husband loves my broccoli dish, and so do many kids. I make it for potlucks, and kids' eyes open wide, saying, "Wow, I do like broccoli!" The secret isn't complicated—it's understanding broccoli as the living thing it once was.
Here's something crucial: the benefits of broccoli can be burned off if you get the pre-cut stuff or rush the cooking process. You have to think of it like the living plant it once was. It takes about 4 minutes once crushed or cut to release its beneficial compounds into itself. If you place it in heat too fast, those compounds burn off. Wait the four minutes to get the benefits.
Add some cloves of garlic—let them get golden and fragrant. The result is blackened, crispy broccoli that even veggie-haters crave. Most people have only ever had raw broccoli or sad, boiled broccoli. But roasted until crispy? You'll want to fill up on it.
The Sacred Act of Eating
But here's what really transforms this simple practice: approach it as meditation, as a sacred act. Think about your food, how good it is, and calm your body before eating. A prayer before a meal really is a smart strategy—one that probably goes back farther than we can remember the names of the gods spoken.
To calm our body means we can absorb more nutrients. If we're stressed, even though we're eating good things, those nutrients don't get absorbed because our body is on lockdown. This is why eating becomes a meditation, a way of honoring both the food and your body's ability to transform it into energy and health.
We have a song we learned from a Hanukkah song (my husband is partly Jewish), and now we sing it together before meals. It feels important. We sometimes light a candle, and nobody can leave before the candle is out. If anyone wants to talk to us, they have to sit at the table. They can leave, but then they cannot talk to us.
We ask about a rose and a thorn of the day—something good and something challenging that happened. Just talking about the difficult things and putting a name to feelings helps dissipate them. And it's always good to remember the good in the world, so one day, when things go wrong, we have something beautiful to remember that it's all worth fighting for.
Recipe 7: Perfect Roasted Vegetables (Any Season)
This isn't just a recipe—it's a technique, a foundation that adapts to whatever's in season, whatever looks good at the market, whatever needs to be used up in your refrigerator.
The Philosophy:
Choose 2-4 pounds of vegetables (any combination)
Use enough good fat to coat lightly (2-4 tablespoons)
Season simply but generously
Respect the timing of different vegetables
Trust the process
Seasonal Inspirations:
Spring Vegetables:
Asparagus spears
Baby potatoes, halved
Spring onions
Fresh peas (add at the end)
Tender herbs: dill, chives, parsley
Summer Vegetables:
Zucchini and summer squash, sliced
Bell peppers, cut in strips
Cherry tomatoes (whole)
Corn kernels
Fresh basil, oregano, thyme
Fall Vegetables:
Brussels sprouts, halved
Sweet potatoes, cubed
Carrots, cut on the diagonal
Red onions, quartered
Sage, rosemary
Winter Vegetables:
Butternut squash, cubed
Cauliflower florets
Parsnips, cut into sticks
Beets, quartered
Hardy herbs: thyme, rosemary
The Foundation (for any season):
2-4 pounds mixed vegetables, cut into similar-sized pieces
3-4 tablespoons good olive oil
1-2 teaspoons sea salt (be generous!)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4-6 cloves garlic, smashed
Optional: fresh herbs
The Simple Transformation:
Preparation as Meditation
Preheat your oven to 375°F. This temperature is perfect for creating good caramelization without burning.
Line a large baking sheet (or two) with parchment paper. Don't crowd the vegetables—they need space for moisture to evaporate and edges to crisp. Overcrowding creates steam, which leads to soggy vegetables instead of beautifully roasted ones.
The Art of the Cut
Cut your vegetables into pieces that are roughly the same size. This ensures everything cooks evenly. Consider the natural cooking times of different vegetables—dense, hard vegetables like carrots take longer than softer ones like zucchini.
For broccoli specifically: cut it fresh, let it sit for 4 minutes to activate its beneficial compounds, then proceed with roasting.
The Sacred Coating
Place your cut vegetables in a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil—enough to lightly coat everything when tossed. Add salt generously and freshly ground pepper. The salt will help draw out moisture and concentrate flavors.
Add smashed garlic cloves—let them get golden and fragrant during roasting.
Toss everything together with your hands. Feel the vegetables, notice their textures, the way the oil distributes. This physical connection with your ingredients is part of the meditation of cooking.
The Patience of Roasting
Spread vegetables in a single layer on your prepared baking sheet. Roast for 25-45 minutes, depending on the vegetables used.
You'll know they're ready when the edges are golden brown and caramelized, and a fork pierces them easily but they still hold their shape. The kitchen will smell incredible—sweet, nutty, deeply satisfying.
The Intelligence of All Things
Here's an epiphany I had one day (possibly influenced by watching "My Octopus Teacher"): all things have intelligence. There is intelligence in all living things, and we are all as efficient as we need to be to survive.
For people who avoid meat to save animals—all food comes from a living thing. Why can't grass have a soul? All trees in a forest share the same DNA, with mother trees spreading care, pest control, nutrients, and signals through fungi in the ground.
Fungi were the oldest fossils known, from about 1 billion years ago. Trees came next, around 800 million years, then animals around 600 million years ago. The mushrooms were once large and above ground, then went below when everything went extinct but them. They can deactivate radioactive waste. They turn dead things to life through decomposition. We need them.
A plant breathes out what we breathe in, and vice versa. We all need one another. If we didn't have mushrooms, nothing would ever decay and come back full circle. A single spoonful of good soil has miles of mycelium networks.
We cannot digest grass, but chickens can. When we eat chickens, we eat what the chickens absorbed and transformed from the grass. We need one another.
The Sacred Balance
We need to eat animals, but they should be sustainably fed and live in areas where they get to walk around. The earth needs this too. If we stopped eating animals, we would stop breeding them, and the earth would be at a loss.
Animals used to be as diverse as the various lands—Britain has a book on 60 breeds of sheep that thrive on various landscapes. But now we breed the most docile cows, sheep, and chickens, and pump them with chemicals on factory farms. What should be fertilizer and great for the land becomes hazardous waste because it's too concentrated and filled with antibiotics and toxins.
We can eat animals in a respectful way. We just weren't meant to try to have a larger population every generation—the way our economy is set up. If we continue that path, we really would need Mars to continue our species, essentially becoming a cancer on this earth that cannot control or feed itself.
The Vegetable Wisdom
Vegetables are incredible on their own, and I love them as a foodie because I can eat as many as I want. I love the crunch, the variety, the way different cooking methods reveal different flavors.
Most people have only ever had raw vegetables or boiled-to-death vegetables. But roasted until the edges are caramelized and crispy? That's when vegetables become irresistible. I've seen kids who "hate vegetables" devour orange-glazed Brussels sprouts sprinkled with bacon at restaurants.
Important cooking wisdom:
If you boil vegetables, drink the cooking water to get their benefits—use it in soup or as a savory tea
Steaming is great and easy for kids to eat—again, save and drink the liquid
Bell peppers have more vitamin C than oranges, but cooking destroys it while creating other benefits
Your body actually absorbs vitamin C better through the skin than through the mouth
Celery isn't empty calories—no green vegetable is. They all have carbohydrates, the kind you want as many of as you can get
The Quality Foundation: Salt and Fat
I learned that the kind of salt matters enormously. If it tastes gross on its own—like the salt in canned tomato sauce—it will not taste good in your dish. This was a revelation that changed everything about my cooking.
Get good, full-fat, grass-fed butter without salt added, so you can control the salt yourself. And invest in quality mineral salts—they are not all created equal. Certain salts actually help you retain minerals in your cells properly, while the wrong kind can make you hold water in ways that leave you feeling bloated rather than hydrated.
If you want to look luminous and drink a lot of water, you also want great kinds of salt—the sea salt mineral kind that works with your body's natural hydration systems rather than against them.
Think of salt like you think of any other ingredient: quality matters. Cheap table salt is to real sea salt what margarine is to grass-fed butter—technically they serve similar functions, but the effects on your body are completely different.
Learn to hold it correctly and watch YouTube videos on proper knife technique. Learn to cut vegetables in a way that gets them all the same size. Try to get a flat surface on whatever you're cutting, then cut into squares or matchsticks for the most consistent cooking.
When you cut vegetables uniformly, they cook evenly. No more burnt edges while the centers are still raw, no more some pieces turning to mush while others stay hard. It's one of those simple skills that transforms everything you cook.
The Art of the Cut
There's also an art to cutting vegetables that makes all the difference in how they cook. Here's a simple trick that changed my cooking game: get just one good chef's knife for around $100. Not the whole block of knives—just start with one quality knife and add more as you need them.
When I came out of college, I had a ton of student debt and wasn't making much, even as an engineer. I wanted to learn to cook for myself, so I took a local class at Sur La Table. I noticed the person working next to the private chef was taking part in all the demonstrations and getting paid! Essentially a glorified dishwasher, but benefiting from $100 to $300 cooking classes per day while earning money.
So I signed up to do the work and got paid to learn to cook in all kinds of classes. I loved it, and I'd suggest it to anyone. You can learn knife skills, cooking techniques, and food knowledge while earning money instead of spending it.
Sometimes the best learning happens when you're willing to start at the bottom and work your way up. Those hands-on experiences taught me more about cooking than any cookbook ever could.
This restraint—this understanding that more isn't always better—applies to much more than cooking. It's a philosophy that can transform your entire relationship with food and health.
Make this your foundation. When you don't know what to cook, roast vegetables. When you want something healthy but satisfying, roast vegetables. When you need to use up what's in your refrigerator, roast vegetables.
Let this simple technique become so automatic that you don't need to think about it. Keep good olive oil, sea salt, and whatever vegetables look best on hand. Know that you can always create something nourishing and delicious with just these basic elements.
The Art of Enough
Perhaps the most important lesson from this simple recipe is understanding when enough is enough. Enough oil to coat but not drown. Enough salt to enhance but not overwhelm. Enough time to transform but not destroy.
This is how you build a sustainable relationship with healthy eating: not through complicated rules or exotic superfoods, but through simple practices that become second nature.
The simplicity is what makes it sustainable. You don't need to remember complex recipes or shop for unusual ingredients. You need vegetables, good oil, salt, heat, time, and reverence. That's it.
When you approach this simple practice with attention and gratitude—when you make it a meditation rather than just a task—you transform not just the vegetables, but your entire relationship with nourishment.
True culinary mastery isn't about complexity—it's about understanding how to reveal the inherent goodness in simple, real ingredients. When you master the art of roasting vegetables, you have a technique that can adapt to any season, any ingredients, any craving.
This is how sustainable healthy eating is built: not through complicated rules, but through simple practices that honor both the intelligence of the food and the wisdom of your body to transform it into health, energy, and joy.
Chapter 7: The Art of Simplicity
Recipe 7: Perfect Roasted Vegetables (Any Season)
The Paradox of Abundance
We live in a time of unprecedented access to recipes, cooking techniques, exotic ingredients, and kitchen gadgets. You can watch YouTube videos that teach you to fold dumplings like a master chef, order ingredients from across the globe with the click of a button, and equip your kitchen with tools that would have amazed professional cooks just a generation ago.
Yet somehow, in the midst of all this culinary abundance, many of us have lost the ability to make simple food taste extraordinary.
Real food is simple, and delicious. When you start with ingredients that are alive—vegetables that still carry the energy of the soil they grew in, herbs that release their essential oils when you crush them between your fingers—you don't need to manipulate them much to create something extraordinary.
The art is in restraint: good salt that enhances rather than overwhelms, olive oil that carries heat evenly, timing that respects the natural rhythms of transformation. This isn't about limitation—it's about understanding that the most profound flavors often come from the most basic techniques, executed with attention and care.
The Lost Language of Simplicity
Our great-grandmothers didn't have thirty different spice blends in their pantries or fifteen different cooking oils to choose from. They had salt, pepper, maybe a few dried herbs, some good fat for cooking, and the wisdom to know how to coax maximum flavor from minimal ingredients.
They understood something we've forgotten: that the best cooking isn't about adding complexity—it's about revealing the inherent goodness that already exists in real food.
Somewhere along the way, we got convinced that cooking had to be complicated to be good. We started believing that meals needed multiple courses, exotic ingredients, and complex techniques to be worthy of our time. We began to think that simple food was somehow inferior food.
But watch a master chef work with a perfect tomato, and you'll see the opposite in action. They might slice it, add a pinch of salt, a drizzle of good olive oil, maybe a leaf of basil. That's it. Because they understand that their job isn't to mask the tomato's flavor but to enhance it, to help it become the most perfect version of itself.
The Alchemy of Heat and Time
When you master the simple technique of roasting vegetables—that ancient alchemy of heat and time that concentrates flavors and creates new compounds—you have a template that can adapt to any season, any mood, any craving.
Roasting is one of humanity's oldest cooking methods, discovered when someone dropped food near a fire and realized that controlled heat could transform raw ingredients into something more delicious, more digestible, more satisfying than the sum of their parts.
What happens during roasting is actually quite magical from a chemical perspective. The dry heat triggers something called the Maillard reaction—a complex series of chemical reactions between amino acids and sugars that creates hundreds of new flavor compounds. This is what gives roasted foods their deep, complex tastes and golden-brown colors.
At the same time, the heat breaks down cell walls, concentrating flavors and making nutrients more available. Water evaporates, intensifying the remaining flavors. Natural sugars caramelize, creating sweetness and depth.
All of this happens automatically, without any effort from you, when you simply apply the right amount of heat for the right amount of time.
Recipe 7: Perfect Roasted Vegetables (Any Season)
This isn't just a recipe—it's a technique, a template, a foundation that you can adapt endlessly based on what's available, what's in season, and what sounds good to you today.
The Philosophy
Choose 2-4 pounds of vegetables (any combination)
Use enough good fat to coat lightly (2-4 tablespoons)
Season simply but generously
Respect the timing of different vegetables
Trust the process
Spring Vegetables
Asparagus spears
Baby potatoes, halved
Spring onions
Fresh peas (add at the end)
Tender herbs: dill, chives, parsley
Summer Vegetables
Zucchini and summer squash, sliced
Bell peppers, cut in strips
Cherry tomatoes (whole)
Corn kernels
Fresh basil, oregano, thyme
Fall Vegetables
Brussels sprouts, halved
Sweet potatoes, cubed
Carrots, cut on the diagonal
Red onions, quartered
Sage, rosemary
Winter Vegetables
Butternut squash, cubed
Cauliflower florets
Parsnips, cut into sticks
Beets, quartered
Hardy herbs: thyme, rosemary
The Foundation (for any season)
2-4 pounds mixed vegetables, cut into similar-sized pieces
3-4 tablespoons good olive oil
1-2 teaspoons sea salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Optional: 2-3 cloves garlic, smashed
Optional: fresh herbs
The Simple Transformation
Preparation as Meditation Preheat your oven to 425°F. This temperature is hot enough to create good caramelization but not so hot that the outsides burn before the insides cook through.
Line a large baking sheet (or two) with parchment paper. Don't crowd the vegetables—they need space for the moisture to evaporate and the edges to crisp. Overcrowding creates steam, which leads to soggy vegetables instead of beautifully roasted ones.
The Art of the Cut Cut your vegetables into pieces that are roughly the same size. This isn't about perfection—it's about ensuring that everything cooks evenly. A two-inch piece of sweet potato will take much longer to cook than a half-inch piece, so uniformity matters more than beauty.
Consider the natural cooking times of different vegetables. Dense, hard vegetables like carrots and potatoes take longer than softer ones like zucchini or bell peppers. You can either cut the harder vegetables smaller, add them to the pan first, or simply accept that some will be more tender than others.
The Sacred Coating Place your cut vegetables in a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil—enough to lightly coat everything when tossed, but not so much that they're swimming in oil. You want them glistening, not drenched.
Add salt and pepper generously. The salt will help draw out moisture and concentrate flavors. Don't be timid—vegetables can handle more seasoning than you think.
Toss everything together with your hands. Feel the vegetables, notice their textures, their weight, the way the oil distributes. This physical connection with your ingredients is part of the meditation of cooking.
The Patience of Roasting Spread the vegetables in a single layer on your prepared baking sheet. If some pieces are touching, that's fine, but avoid piling them on top of each other.
Slide the pan into the oven and resist the urge to check on them too often. Let the heat do its work. Depending on the size and type of vegetables, they'll need 25-45 minutes.
After about 20 minutes, you can gently stir or flip them to ensure even browning, but this isn't strictly necessary if they're cut uniformly.
The Recognition of Doneness You'll know they're ready when the edges are golden brown and slightly caramelized, and a fork pierces them easily but they still hold their shape. The kitchen will smell incredible—sweet, nutty, deeply satisfying.
If you're adding tender herbs like basil or parsley, toss them with the vegetables in the last 5 minutes of cooking, or add them fresh after the vegetables come out of the oven.
The Universal Template
This basic technique works with virtually any vegetable, but understanding a few principles will help you adapt it successfully:
Dense vegetables (root vegetables, winter squash, Brussels sprouts) need longer cooking times and higher heat. Cut them smaller or give them a head start.
Tender vegetables (zucchini, bell peppers, asparagus) cook quickly and can become mushy if overdone. Add them later or cut them larger.
Watery vegetables (tomatoes, mushrooms, eggplant) release moisture as they cook. Give them extra space and don't worry if they seem to shrink dramatically.
Delicate herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro) should be added at the end to preserve their bright flavors and colors.
Hardy herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage) can withstand the full cooking time and actually benefit from the concentrated heat.
The Seasonal Dance
This recipe becomes a way of connecting with the natural rhythms of the year. In spring, you're celebrating the tender, delicate flavors of the first vegetables emerging from winter's dormancy. In summer, you're capturing the abundance and vibrant colors of peak growing season. In fall, you're concentrating the hearty, grounding flavors that will sustain you through winter. In winter, you're drawing sweetness and comfort from vegetables that stored their energy through the cold months.
Each season brings its own palette of flavors, colors, and textures. Learning to work with what's naturally available when it's available connects you to the larger rhythms of the earth and ensures that you're eating foods at their peak nutritional value and flavor.
Building the Habit
This is how you build a sustainable relationship with healthy eating: not through complicated rules or exotic superfoods, but through simple practices that become second nature.
When you master this basic roasting technique, you always have a way to turn any vegetable into something delicious. You're never stuck wondering what to do with that bunch of kale or those Brussels sprouts that looked good at the farmers market. You have a reliable method that works with whatever's available, whatever's affordable, whatever's in season.
The simplicity is what makes it sustainable. You don't need to remember complex recipes or shop for unusual ingredients. You need vegetables, good oil, salt, heat, and time. That's it.
The Ripple Effects
As you make this simple practice a regular part of your cooking routine, several things happen:
Your palate develops an appreciation for the natural flavors of vegetables rather than the artificial flavors of processed foods.
Your confidence grows in the kitchen as you learn to trust the process and adapt based on what you observe.
Your relationship with food becomes more intuitive as you learn to cook by sight, smell, and taste rather than rigid adherence to recipes.
Your grocery shopping becomes easier because you know you can make anything delicious with this basic technique.
Your meal planning becomes more flexible because you can adapt to what's fresh, what's on sale, or what you have on hand.
The Art of Enough
Perhaps the most important lesson from this simple recipe is the art of knowing when enough is enough. Enough oil to coat but not drown. Enough salt to enhance but not overwhelm. Enough time to transform but not destroy.
This restraint—this understanding that more isn't always better—applies to much more than cooking. It's a philosophy that can transform your entire relationship with food and health.
In a culture that constantly tells us we need more—more supplements, more superfoods, more complex protocols—this simple roasted vegetable recipe whispers a different truth: that profound satisfaction often comes from simple things, done well, with attention and care.
The Daily Practice
Make this your foundation. When you don't know what to cook, roast vegetables. When you want something healthy but satisfying, roast vegetables. When you need to use up what's in your refrigerator, roast vegetables.
Let this simple technique become so automatic that you don't need to think about it. Keep good olive oil, sea salt, and whatever vegetables look best on hand. Know that you can always create something nourishing and delicious with just these basic elements.
This isn't about perfection—it's about practice. Some batches will be more successful than others. Some vegetables will cook more evenly than others. Some combinations will be more harmonious than others. That's all part of the learning process.
The goal isn't to become a perfect cook—it's to become a confident one, someone who understands that simple, real food, prepared with care and attention, is often the most satisfying food of all.
True culinary mastery isn't about complexity—it's about understanding how to reveal the inherent goodness in simple, real ingredients. When you master the art of roasting vegetables, you have a technique that can adapt to any season, any ingredients, any craving. This is how sustainable healthy eating is built: not through complicated rules, but through simple practices that become second nature.