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in./45.5 × 33 × 2.5 cm) to accommodate a pound of vegetables while giving them enough breathing room. Your vegetables will tend to steam, not brown, if they’re crammed on a smaller sheet.
    It’s also totally worth your while to get friendly with parchment paper. (No more sticking—I will say nothing else.) This isn’t too hard, considering you can order 100 premeasured sheets in a handy tube from the King Arthur Flour Web site or catalog.
    I know I’m starting to sound like a QVC commercial, but I have to ask you to buy one more thing if you aspire to be the roasting queen (or king, or just hometown hero): an oven thermometer. These roasting recipes all call for cooking at pretty high temps—450 to 475°F/230 to 245°C (Gas Mark 8 to 9). If your oven is off (and most are), you might incinerate your veggies—or have to wait around for them to cook. With the help of an oven thermometer, you’ll know whether your oven is running hot or cool, and you can compensate by just raising or lowering the temperature. You should feel free to use your oven’s convection function for roasting vegetables; I think it makes especially crispy potatoes. You’ll have to compensate by lowering your oven temperature by twenty—five degrees and checking for doneness a few minutes earlier.
    There is one more secret to quick—roasting: Cut your vegetables quite thinly, or into small pieces, and they will cook quickly. (No big chunks, please.) This is how, for instance, you can actually roast beets on a weeknight. Whole beets or even quartered beets take 1 or 2 hours to cook; beets sliced thinly roast in about 20 minutes. Don’t worry if your knife skills aren’t perfect. Try to keep your pieces about the same size, but we’re not giving out prizes for good looks.
    That’s it. You now have a choice. You can follow one of the recipes in this chapter, each with its own flavor twist, or you can improvise your own roasted vegetables following the foundationrecipe I’ve provided on page 28 and the table of cooking times for vegetables, below. Be generous with oil and salt at first, then adjust for your own preferences. Flip the veggies if you like; forget about it if it bugs you. One side of your vegetables will be browner than the other if you don’t flip, but they’ll cook through either way.
Vegetables for Roasting

Foundation Recipe for Quick—Roasting
    Here’s an opportunity to roast whatever you’ve got in the fridge or pantry tonight. If you want to roast more than one kind of vegetable on the same sheet pan, just be sure the vegetables are cut similarly and cook in about the same amount of time (see the table on page 27 ). And be sure you still have about 1 lb/455 g (after trimming) on a large baking sheet. Much more, and the veggies won’t cook evenly or very quickly. Much less, and the veggies will tend to cook too quickly, browning too much before becoming tender and leaving the parchment paper scorched.
    Three tablespoons of olive oil is a good amount for most of the vegetables; you can bring that down to two if you like, especially with a moister vegetable. Two is plenty, for example, for quick—roasting zucchini. But you might even want to go up to four tablespoons (¼ cup/60 ml) for a vegetable that can dry out or that you want super—crisp, like potatoes or sweet potatoes. Vegetables tend to be browner on the outside and moister on the inside when tossed in plenty of oil. Whatever you do, remember the smaller or the thinner you cut the vegetable, the faster it will cook. I hope you’ll get a chance to use this foundation recipe for many nights of roasted vegetables, so you’ll be able to figure out what you like best.
    Over the years, I’ve moved away from mixing fresh herbs with vegetables before roasting because the herbs have a tendency to burn. I prefer to add them afterward. Here, I’ve included a nifty way to do that—a flavored butter that you can customize, depending on what you have on hand. And you