How To Make Glazed Vegetables
Jason of Reno cooks glazed vegetables. This glazed vegetables recipe really should be tasted to be appreciated.
Step 1: Meet Jason Beckwith:
Hi my name is Jason Beckwith and today I’m going to cook with you glazed vegetables.
Step 2: Preparation:
It’s very simple to prepare, easy to do around the holidays like I am today, so I’m going to show you how to make a very simple vegetable dish. First of all, what I did a little bit in advance is I cut up a turnip, I also did some pearl onions, and you can buy all of these ingredients at a local store. I went to Rae Lee’s. You can also buy it at the Baby Carrots. Or if you’re really ambitious you can cut them up yourself into small pieces.
Step 3: Turning turnips:
We’ll chop up a leek which is kind of like a giant onion. Ultimately, this is what you get, you get kind of a mixture of different kind of bulbs and things of that nature. Now you’ll notice my turnips are kind of cut funny. And this is what’s called turning. This is a French technique of taking a vegetable or a potato and making it look kind of like an American football. I can show you how to do that if you’d like. I’ll take this turnip right here, I’m going to cut it into quarters. I’m going to grab, I’ve kind of got a curved herring knife. It works really well. You can buy this at any local good cooking store. What you end up doing is kind of cutting and trimming it in curved shape kind of following the lines of the quarter and it ultimately will start to look like is a little football. And this works especially well with potatoes because you can cook a potato. As you can see it’s pretty easy to make look like a little football. So I’ll throw it in our little thing here.
Step 4: Steaming the vegetables:
The first thing we need to do is to put all these vegetable in a flat pan, give them enough space so they can kind of be evenly dispersed in a pan. Next thing we’re going to do is take some water, plain old tap water, and fill it up till it just about covers the vegetable. That’s about right. Now we’re going to take about, let’s say, one or two teaspoons, I use unsalted butter. You can use margarine but unsalted butter is kind of preferred. And we’re going to turn that right there and we’re going to turn it on. Let’s start to boil up. The ultimate goal is to let this steam and reduce into a sauce, and what we’re going to do is add some sugar and it’s going to put a glaze on to this.
Step 5: Herbs you should use:
Before I add the sugar, I’m going to take some of the herbs that I chose which are chives, savory, some rosemary, which you can grow in your garden in northern Nevada; it’s a really hardy herb. Also some thyme, and once again you can buy all this at a local store like I did today. Also I’m going to add some black peppercorns and some salt. I also am going to chop up some Italian parsley, a little bit here, to add some flavour to our little herb mixture. I kind of put it in our little herb collective here. So I’m going to kind of mix this around and just going to kind of sprinkle this in the mix here. And what will happen to it, during the glazing process, it will infuse some of the flavours from these herbs into our glaze…couple peppercorns and salt. Stir this around and evenly disperse this.
Step 6: Add the sugar:
One thing I did forget is a little bit of sugar, so pardon me for a second. Pour the equivalent of about maybe a quarter cup of sugar over this. And that’s what’s going to help. The butter and the sugar and all the vegetable are going to start to infuse and get the glaze going. This is going to take a while. Probably start to finish, you’re talking, probably about 25 minutes. It’s ideally done toward the end of a meal like I have today. My potatoes are going; my gravy is ready, got a turkey in the oven so we’re in pretty good shape. Let’s let this kind of simmer for a while. We’ll come back in about 15 minutes and see how it’s doing. Now let’s take a quick look at what we’re doing here. We’re about 15 minutes into it; it’s reduced down quite a bit, probably got about another 10 minutes. It’s kind of softening up a little bit, the liquid here is starting to take on the tinge of the herbs and the butter and all that so I think let’s check back in about 10 minutes. I think we’ll be ready.
Step 7: Thanks for watching:
I hope you enjoyed today’s little exercise in a very simple way to prepare vegetables and for dinner tonight, this is our Christmas dinner, I kind of made a very simple turkey breast. It’s kind of a Mexican flavour to it with mole sauce and bacon. We’re going to have our glazed vegetables we prepared with our traditional mashed potatoes and stuffing. So thank you for coming and I’ll see you at the table.
