— Mary Wise

So this is a standard technique, Mary, that we teach within many of our programs, uh, including the Forks Over Knives program. Um, and there's a lot, lot of different ways to do this. It really depends on the vegetables that you're roasting and the flavors that you want on those vegetables. Um, typically when I'm roasting vegetables without oil, I'm gonna cut my vegetables a little bit smaller than typical with, you know, with oil roasting because I don't want them to dry out too much before they, you know, kind of finish cooking. So I'll typically roast them a little bit hotter, a little bit faster and a little bit smaller dice. But in terms of coating them with something that's not oil, there's really any number of things that I'll use. Uh, everything from just a splash of, you know, veggie stock with some, uh, dried, you know, spices could be just a little bit of, uh, dehydrated onion or some cumin powder or some paprika. Uh, it could be a smoked chili pepper. It could be, um, just as as simple as just a little bit of black pepper, a little bit of salt. The idea here is you want to create something to help with the adherence on the exterior part of the vegetables, but, but not something that in the hot oven is gonna burn and smoke and create off flavors. So typically what I'll do when I'm roasting without oil is I'll apply some, uh, flavoring, you know, in advance so that while I'm cooking, I'm getting some development of flavor and then I'm monitoring a nice hot oven, not crowding the pan, even moving things on the pan, you know, kind of scooping and rearranging to make sure I'm getting good coverage. But then the second thing I do is I'll typically apply a second round of flavoring right when that vegetable is done and coming off the sheet pan. So an example here would be like, great, I've got some roasted sweet potatoes that I roasted very simply with maybe just a tiny bit of salt and pepper and I'm gonna pull 'em off and I'm gonna toss in some chopped spinach leaves and some chili peppers and, you know, some other herbs and just be like, done and be like, great, that will sort of wilt and heat and that makes a beautiful side dish that, um, it's just gonna be something that looks really attractive, but it's a secondary flavor that I'm building, um, after I've already established that primary flavor. And then after, um, you know, I kind of decide where, where my flavor's gonna go. So it's gonna look really delicious, even just with some herbs. But if you add things like some chopped up greens, again, kale, spinach, uh, whatever it might be, um, that's also gonna be really, really great.