Weekend foodie: Spiced Roasted Autumn Vegetables & Chickpeas

Here's a great recipe for packing in your 5-a-day veggies. In fact there are 7 different vegetables here! As both the sweet potato and chickpeas are a great source of fibre and are low GI carbohydrates, you won't get that glucose high and subsequent crash like you do with ordinary roasted potatoes. Also, if you've not tried fennel before, I highly recommend you do. When roasted like this, it becomes beautifully sweet and really adds a different dimension to the roasted vegetables. It's also a fantastic source of vitamins A and C, iron and calcium.


Ingredients (serves 4):
*1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into approx 2cm pieces
*1 fennel bulb, thinly sliced
*1 small red onion, roughly sliced
*2-3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
*1 yellow pepper, sliced
*olive oil
*1-2 teaspoons of mixed herbs and spices (I used a blend including turmeric, cardamon, nutmeg and rosemary, but experiment with whatever takes your fancy)
*punnet of tomatoes
*1 can chickpeas, drained
*(optional) some cooked spinach (I use the frozen spinach portions, just heat them in a pan for a couple of minutes)

1. Heat the oven to 200C/350F.
2. Put the sweet potato pieces, fennel slices, red onion, crushed garlic cloves and sliced yellow pepper into a large roasting tin. Drizzle with a good glug of olive oil, sprinkle over the herbs and spices and rub in with your hands, mixing up all the vegetables. Cook in the pre-heated oven for around 30 minutes, stirring every so often.
3. Add the tomatoes (pierce them first to make sure they don't explode!) and the drained chickpeas and cook for a further 20 minutes, or until the veggies are soft and have started to brown.

I felt like a bit of green was needed, so I mixed in some cooked spinach at the end. But parsley would be another option and another good source of iron.


P.S. I always recommend using organic ingredients where possible. I'm just not a fan of chemicals in my food.