Carrot, Parsnip and Sausage One-Pot Dinner

I love parsnips.  They must have to be in my top five all time favourite vegetables.  Unfortunately for me though, parsnips seem to be ridiculously expensive.  I still haven't quite worked out why or how they can possibly really cost $10/kg.  Roll on the day when Hubby and I finally get the vege patch up and running and I grow my own (please, oh please let there be a variety that is happy to grow in South East Queensland!).

In a celebration of the wonderfulness of parsnips (and the fact that I had some), along with a hectic day and a cold wintery night, recently I found this lovely one-pot recipe in a new favourite recipe book of mine - Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion and decided it ticked all my boxes.

I had to amend the recipe slightly as I went - simply because I think my dish was smaller than the one in the recipe and because I wanted to sub out some carrot and sub in some sweet potato and potato.  But in the end, I cut up carrots, onions, parsnips, sweet potato and little potatoes we happened to have in the fridge.

I cooked the onion slices off in a pan with some olive oil, and then poured some more olive oil into a pyrex glass dish and then added all the veges, 2 unpeeled garlic cloves and 2 bay leaves.  I covered the lot with foil and popped it in the oven for 20 minutes on 180.

Once the 20 minutes was up, I pulled the dish out of the oven, turned the vegetables over and added in eight sausages, making sure they got coated in plenty of the oil in the dish.  Then I popped the onion in over the top, put the foil back on and put it back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

At the end of the second 20 minutes, I pulled the dish out, took the foil off and turned the vegetables and the sausages.  I had been concerned that the sausages wouldn't cook all the way through, but after 20 minutes they were looking good!

The final stage is to crank the oven up to 200, put the dish back in (without the foil) and cook for about 15 minutes (have a look at it after 10 and see what you think).  To serve, I just put the dish on a trivet on the table, and had a stack of fresh crusty bread on hand to go with it.

Hubby whipped up a simple gravy to have alongside it as well, which really just finished things off.  Can I just say, this dish is an ABSOLUTE WIN.  It was so easy, and so much is done by the oven, rather than the cook, that it's not a big ask to duck away every 20 minutes to turn the veges over.  We had enough left over (from feeding four) to feed two with left overs the next night, so, depending on the veges you choose (you don't HAVE to use parsnip), it can be a super cheap dinner.