Roasted Vegetables with Honey-Balsamic Dressing
A warm salad that lives on contrast: vegetables straight from the oven land on cold spinach and salad leaves, and in that moment the leaves soften at the edges without collapsing. The cuts are deliberately unmatched — pumpkin and eggplant in cubes, pepper in strips, onion and tomato in wedges — so each vegetable still reads as itself on the fork.
Why the oven, not the pan
Dry oven heat drives water out of the pumpkin and eggplant and caramelizes the sugars at the cut edges; the same vegetables in an oiled skillet mostly stew in their own juice. Don’t cut too small — the pieces shed roughly a third of their volume, and tiny cubes dry to leather. The spoonful of honey in the dressing picks up that roasted sweetness, while the balsamic keeps it from turning cloying.
Toast the 50 g of pine nuts (a scant 2 oz) in a dry pan for a minute or two, until they smell nutty — untoasted they taste of almost nothing. Dress only at the table: leaves dressed in advance sit down within five minutes. If pine nuts are beyond the budget, chopped walnuts or pumpkin seeds give the same crunch. Butternut squash is the easiest stand-in for the pumpkin in a US or UK kitchen.
Part of Ukrainian cuisine — 447 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Cut the pumpkin and eggplant into small cubes, the bell pepper into strips, and the onion and tomatoes into wedges.
Place the cut vegetables in a greased baking dish, season with salt and pepper, drizzle with oil, and roast. Let cool.
For the dressing, mix the olive oil with the vinegar and honey, season with salt and pepper, and add the nuts.
To serve, toss the roasted vegetables with the spinach, arrange on salad leaves, and drizzle with the dressing.
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