Recipes: My Favorite Winter Vegetables and How to Cook Them

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majaswhole30diary

6 min readJan 12, 2018

Do you eat seasonally? There are several seriously strong arguments for why you should, or at least, as much as you can. Here are a few of them:

Seasonal vegetables are just better — if you’re eating something in a season that was meant to be grown during that season, it feels right. It tastes right. It’s at its very best. That’s because it was grown in conditions ideal for that particular fruit or vegetable. When you try to grow vegetables out of season, they get angry. I learned all about this when trying to grow mizuna greens and arugula from seed in July heat this year. Lolz.
It helps you appreciate each season, which is a really good practice to get into. Life is more fun when you can appreciate all four seasons (or however many you get where you live).
Environmentally speaking, eating seasonally (ideally, seasonally and locally) is a really solid thing to do. When you eat food that is meant to be grown and eaten during a particular time of year, that means it doesn’t have to travel halfway across the world to meet you.
On a practical level, eating seasonally is SO MUCH CHEAPER. When your little carton of organic strawberries travels from Chile to your local Whole Foods, you have to pay for its plane ticket. And they don’t taste as good, because they were probably picked prematurely in order to get to you in time to be ripe-ish.

So yes — I’m usually not into telling people what they should do (and absolutely hate when people tell me what I should do), I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to eat seasonally. I’ll just leave that there.

What’s in Season Right Now

Since eating Whole 30 is already a fairly expensive endeavor (stay tuned for a post about Whole 30 and budgeting), I’ve been really leaning into eating seasonal vegetables — for all the reasons above, but especially for the cost savings.

I also just love all winter vegetables, even if they require a bit more work than their summery counterparts. So here’s an ode to these guys:

BEETS

If you’ve been following my Instagram stories lately, you’ve probably noticed an overwhelming number of mentions of beet soup/bone broth (I’ve been calling it both). I’m obsessed with this stuff!

To be honest, I don’t usually love eating raw/cooked beets — the earthiness and the texture can be off-putting to me (sue me). In a salad with some goat cheese, for sure, but just by themselves — meh.

When I make my beet bone broth, I roast the beets, then blend them with bone broth and lemon juice. Then I strain the beets out, leaving a clean broth. This is how you make Polish barszcz, and that’s how I like to drink it. The fun part is that usually, you can reuse the cooked beets and make ANOTHER BATCH OF BEET SOUP! I know, very exciting. You can also eat them as a side dish, as I’ve slowly started to do. If you love beets, I highly recommend doing this, as you get to enjoy them twice — once as a protein and mineral-rich broth, and again as an easy little side dish/salad topper.

Here’s my recipe for beet bone broth. Enjoy!

BROCCOLI

If you were asked to think of the standard clean eating/paleo/Whole 30 plate, you’d probably think of steamed broccoli, baked sweet potato, and grilled or baked chicken. Which is FINE (I mean, boring, but fine).

Broccoli Rice

The thing is — there is so much more to broccoli than being a boring, cruciferous sidekick. One of my favorite ways to eat broccoli lately is actually as broccoli rice, which you can buy pre-riced at Trader Joe’s. Making broccoli rice is as easy as:

Heating a skillet with a little oil of your choosing.
Add broccoli rice and sautée, stirring until cooked.
Add salt and pepper, maybe a little lemon or lime juice depending on what you’re eating it with.
(That’s it.)

In the picture above, I stirred in lime juice and chopped cilantro and topped it with barbacoa (recipe to come). It was super yummy.

Crispy Roasted Broccoli

My partner is a huge fan of crispy, roasted broccoli. We’ve been using this recipe for both broccoli and cauliflower — it makes them almost decadent. Yesterday, he actually said the words, “I would almost prefer these over French fries.” (Can’t take it back now, buddy!)

TURNIPS AND PARSNIPS

My dad got us all addicted to a dish he calls “roasted roots” — which combines the best root vegetables of the season into one delicious, sweet+savory side dish. I wish I had more recipes for turnips and parsnips, but I’m so obsessed with these roasted roots that I haven’t been too motivated to find any.

Roasted Roots

2 medium sweet potatoes
1 large parsnip
1 large turnip
1 celery root
3 medium carrots
Fresh thyme
Oil for roasting (high temp olive like avocado)
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 425. Chop all vegetables into even cubes, about 1/2 inch wide. Toss roots in oil, salt and pepper, and distribute across baking sheets. Make sure your roots have room, so they roast and don’t steam. Bake for about 40 minutes, until slightly crispy. Finish with a little more salt.

CAULIFLOWER

Cauliflower is one of those vegetables that you don’t really think about until you’re doing paleo/Whole 30, and then it’s suddenly your best friend and in all your profile pics. Cauliflower, with its mild flavor and functional texture, can be used to make all sorts of things:

Pizza crusts (not Whole 30, but very appreciated by this celiac girl) — I love the one from Trader Joe’s
Rice — you can make your own or buy it pre-riced
Fried rice, which is its own category
Stuffed cabbage (acting in place of rice)
Crispy buffalo morsels of goodness
Etc.

Before Whole 30, I might have had one cauliflower pizza per week. Not even mad about it. I’d much prefer to eat a gluten-free, cauliflower-based pizza than one made with tapioca starch and potato starch.

To be honest, I usually just make it as cauliflower rice, following the instructions above (for broccoli rice). I’ll top it with bolognese, meatballs and marinara, pulled pork — any protein, especially one with a sauce.

SWEET POTATOES

Fries (An Ongoing Quest)

We’re still perfecting our recipe for sweet potato fries. Do you have one? We’ve done the whole parboil-then rice-then arrowroot-then roast thing and they’re never quite the way I want them to be. Perhaps I should just get an air fryer and be done with it. (Birthday is March 19, hint hint) Maybe I should just stop being so picky. Is it so wrong to want baked sweet potato fries to be crispy? Le sigh.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

I do have a solid recipe for roasted sweet potatoes, though. It’s super basic — coconut oil, salt, sweet potatoes — but roasting them face-side down like this makes them soft on the inside with a nice roasted bite on the outside.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST: SPAGHETTI SQUASH

Spaghetti squash has been my best friend in the past week or so. Because it’s in season, it’s super sweet right now (at least to my Whole 30 palate), making it awesome for both breakfast (when I can’t handle more intensely vegetable-y vegetables) and dinner (when I want a tasty, basic carb-y vegetable).

I always roast my spaghetti squash the same way, following these instructions from Greatist: