 Hey everyone, I've been on vacation this past week, went to Kauai, had some fantastic meals out, and one in particular is what I'm making today. I'm making some roasted vegetables. I've got gold potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, carrots, beets, and it's served over a bed of homemade pesto sauce with a balsamic reduction drizzle. It was fantastic then, and it's fantastic today that I'm going to be making it for you. But before we get into the recipe, I just want to encourage you to subscribe to my channel because we're always cooking up something very delicious and healthy. That's my emphasis, so I don't want you to miss it, and we'd love to have you join us. Let's get started on our recipe. I've got my vegetables here, now here's how this is all going to work. We've got our vegetables, they're going to go in the oven, and they're going to roast for probably 35 to 40 minutes. At that time, then we're going to be making our balsamic reduction, now it'll take about 30 minutes, so those two things will be doing their own thing by themselves. They don't need too much attention from us, and while that's happening, we'll make our pesto sauce. So we're going to start with our veggies here. I've got my broccoli right over here that's already in floret size. The goal here is to cook everything, you know, have everything cook up at about the same rate. Now carrots and potatoes and beets take a little bit longer. I've got some asparagus here, which I didn't mention earlier. They're about less than pencil thickness, right? They're going to cook up very quickly, so I'm not going to put them on the pan until the last maybe 10, maybe 12 minutes before they're done cooking, so they don't take very much time. Alright, so let's, I've got my sweet potatoes already peeled. I'm not going to peel my gold potatoes because they're organic and I don't need to. I have a half of a bell pepper that I just happened to have in the fridge. I'm going to toss that in, so I'm going to cut that into bigger chunks, you know, one inch size probably, so they don't cook up too quickly and dry out, throw those on the pan. Now with our potatoes, like I said, I'm going to cut those, cut those into any size chunk that you want. Try and keep it uniform. If it's a half an inch, try and cut all the potatoes that size. So something like that. That way they'll cook up nice and even. So here's how I cut up the vegetables. Keep in mind when you're cutting up the beets, though, that they do stain, so be careful with that. And then I decided I'd go ahead and go back and cut up the sweet potato just a little bit smaller. We've got our baking pan pretty full. We don't want to overcrowd it because we want these vegetables to roast, right? We don't want them to steam, so they're all touching the bottom of the pan. That's what you want. And now I'm just going to go ahead and drizzle on some olive oil. In the oven, like I said, it's preheated to 425 degrees. And don't forget you can get the whole recipe down below in the description of the video. So go ahead and sprinkle that on. Get some olive oil in there. Just coat it. Toss it with your hands. Coat everything. And then just sprinkle a little bit of salt over the top. Hold your hand high. It'll spread out a little more evenly that way. And that's good to go. This is ready to go. In the oven, let me spread this out a little bit. And we're going to start roasting this. And we'll set the timer for 20 minutes. We'll place it right there in the middle of the oven and set our timer. Now we're moving into our balsamic reduction. So we're going to take this as a very inexpensive brand of watery balsamic vinegar. As you can see, it just pours out like water. I have a whole video on how to do this very in-depth. So if you want that, you can. I've got this up to medium-high heat. And we're just going to cook it, bring it to a boil. Once it comes to a boil, we're going to let it simmer. We're going to reduce the heat and make sure it simmers for about 20 to 30 minutes or until it reduces by, you know, probably half to two-thirds. Then it's going to thicken up and the flavors are going to intensify. It's going to get sweeter and it's just going to be more vibrant. So you can see now that the balsamic is starting to simmer on medium heat. And we're going to let that go for, like I said, 20 to 30 minutes. Now right next to my balsamic reduction, I've got another frying pan. I have a small frying pan here and I have it on medium-low heat. I've got three cloves of garlic you could do for. What we're going to do here for our pesto is I've left the skin on. You see that on the garlic? I haven't taken it off. That's going to protect it from burning. We're going to place these into a pan and we're going to rotate them over, you know, as it cooks and we want to brown them up and it's going to soften it up. And it's going to add so much flavor to our pesto, you're going to love it. It's going to mellow out that garlic. It won't have that harsh bite to it that it does when you use it raw. And it just is amazing. It's a great way to just get a lot of extra flavor into your garlic and into your dish. So we've got a lot of things going. We've got the vegetables in the oven. We've got our reduction here and we've got our garlic going over here. I'm going to turn that up just a little bit to get things moving and we're going to just continue to toast these. They haven't even gotten hot yet. That's why I'm touching them with my hands. All right, so here's our veggies after 20 minutes, you can get a look at these. You can see that broccoli is browning up really well. Okay, I'm going to put those back in for another, I'd say, five or six minutes. The broccoli is getting done a lot quicker. I think I'm going to throw the asparagus in there now. All right, broccoli needs to come out. So I'm going to take it out, place it in a dish, keep it warm. Now I coated the asparagus in oil so they're already, and salted them, they're already greased up and they'll just cook for a few more minutes. Now the garlic has softened up nicely. I can feel it. It's soft now. That's what you want. That's how you know it's roasted and done. It's good enough. So I'm going to take it out, place it on a dish to cool, and then we'll remove the rest of the skins once it gets cool. Now to this pan, we're going to add some raw walnuts, and we're going to toast those walnuts for more flavor. These are going to taste amazing, and this will only take a cup, you know, two, three minutes or so. I've got the temperature on medium heat. Our walnuts are pretty much done. You can see the brown spots there. I'm going to turn the heat off. I'm going to toss them into my dish with the garlic. Okay, so our vegetables are done. It's been about 30 minutes total, and you can test them, you know, make sure your potatoes are done. Those are certainly done. Carrots, good. Beets, everything's good. So back to our reduction, our balsamic reduction. You can see it's really dropped down. It's reduced quite a bit, and it's thickened up a bit. I can tell it's much more syrupy. How do you know when it's done? Well, we've reduced it quite a bit, and I take a spoon, and you can see it coats the back of your spoon. Right now this looks a little bit thin, but as it cools it will definitely thicken up. So I'm going to turn the heat off and let that cool a bit. Now we're going to work on our pesto sauce. So I'm going to take my walnuts that have been toasted. I'm going to place them into the food processor, and then we're going to take the skins off of the garlic, and you'll notice that they're soft. Soft to the touch, and that skin prevented it from burning, but just mellows out the flavor. These are nice and soft. So I'm going to toss that into the food processor. Now with the basil, you just want to take the leaves off of the stems. So that's what I'm doing here. Now one thing about basil, if you start chopping it up or tearing it, it tends to turn black. It oxidizes very quickly, and so that doesn't make our pesto look so great, right? So what I like to do is if you add some lemon juice that will help prevent that from happening, as well as adding some fresh parsley to the mix. And that keeps it nice and bright and green and very appetizing looking. So you want about a cup's worth of basil. I just purchased one of these containers from Trader Joe's. It's about four ounces, it says, on the container of basil, and I just used the whole container, and that seems to work perfectly well. Okay, so this is all of our basil, and that's going to go into the food processor as well. And then I'll take a section of fresh parsley, just a nice handful of it. I'll take out any big stems, and just drop that right in the container in the food processor. And then I'm going to take some lemon. I've got my lemon squeezer here, and I'm just going to squeeze about a tablespoon's worth. Let's start with that, and we'll start mixing. Grab yourself a spatula and just scrape down the sides a little bit to keep things in the mixing area. Okay, at this point I'm going to add just a little bit of salt for now. I'm going to be adding more probably as we go. Now I'm going to drizzle some olive oil in there, probably about a quarter of a cup as we go. Just continue adding enough oil to get a nice smooth consistency. Now because I'm serving this with some nice warm vegetables, I'm going to place my sauce into a saucepan and just heat it a bit on the stove. All right, so we are ready to serve it up. Everything is ready. Our pesto sauce is warm. I heated my plate up and we're going to take our pesto sauce and I'm just going to smear it on the bottom of my plate. This is how it was served in the restaurant and it was just so delightful. All right, now I'm going to scoop up some of the vegetables and just start piling them on the plate. They look amazing. Look at this. This is a wonderful dish. You can also make it easier on yourself. You can make your balsamic reduction a couple of days before. It doesn't really matter. We'll keep. And the same with the pesto. And then we'll take our reduction, which is much more syrupy than when it started out. And I'm just going to drizzle a little bit over all. I'm ready for my taste test. I know this is amazing, but I've got to taste it for you and tell you about it. This is my new favorite way to eat vegetables. It's absolutely delicious. The pesto sauce with the balsamic reduction is such a beautiful combination. Like I said, do yourself a favor. Make the reduction ahead of time a couple of days before. Have it on hand whenever you want to make this dish. Same thing with your pesto sauce. You can freeze it, put it in ice cube trays, and then it's always ready. I'll just heat it up. Then you just have to roast your vegetables with a little bit of olive oil and salt. You have a restaurant quality dish here. Absolutely delicious. You're going to love it. If you think this looks good, give me a thumbs up, share the video, and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. We'd love to have you. So thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.