What to Cook For Dinner? The Vegetable Dilemna

[jjhunter]

Hey all--

I'm signed up to cook with my friend D- at the Co-op tonight, and I'm not sure what I want to do for our two vegetable dishes. (For starch we're doing wheat rolls, for protein some kind of chili.) To give you some context, we're cooking for 25 - 35, and the cook's assistant will be making a basic salad of some kind. We usually start cooking ~3pm EST (i.e. in about 2 hours as of this post) and serve dinner at 6:30pm.

What we currently have ingredients-wise in the walk-in refrigerator:

• some kind of yellow-hued squash with skin as tough as pumpkin -- maybe spaghetti squash?
• parsnips
• beets
• carrots
• lemons
• grapefruit
• okra - tagged 'use me!'
• zucchini
• celery
• brussels sprouts
• eggplant [we had this last night, so I'd rather not use this as a primary ingredient]

Assuming as you should that we've got all the usual kitchen basics (e.g. onions + garlic + various oils) and then some, any suggestions? Both D- and I are good cooks; sometimes we do fancy dishes, sometimes simple, but in general we like to bring out what's uniquely delicious about particular ingredients (as opposed to drowning them in batter or otherwise masking the taste.) My default would be grilling the brussels sprouts with a little veggie oil and sautéing the zucchini, but I'm in the mood to do something different - I just don't know what.

ETA: For those interested, I did do the beet burger recipe several nights later. Here's the aftermath report in a comment thread.

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

Beet Burgers. Big ingred. list, but you've got a lot of it, and the result is super fun.

Harvest Casserole. This is gorgeous.

And yeah, my favourite easy thing to do with brussels sprouts is just to halve and sauté them in butter or bacon fat.

[jjhunter]

Gah. That first one in particular sounds so. darn. good. I'll check with D- and see what he thinks re: how it would work out timing-wise, but wow. I'm definitely bookmarking that one so that if we don't do it tonight we do it later in the week...

[kathmandu]

If it's too complicated, beets can be scrubbed, quartered, and roasted til tender. Then slice and serve with lemon and whatever else seems good to you.