Roast Veg with Buffalo Haloumi

Written on 21 August 2019.

Roasting vegetables is a great way to prepare vegetables allowing you to add flavours with various herbs or spices as well as the slight caramelisation you get with roasting. This is a quick recipe for a vegetable packed dinner peppered with chunks of delicious haloumi made in Cork from Water Buffalo milk. Of course, any haloumi you can get will do in a pinch.

Ingredients:

• Two or more heads of Broccoli
• 350g Asparagus
• 300g Halloumi
• 600g Baby potatoes
• 2 Garlic cloves crushed
• Fresh Sage
• 1 x fresh lemon
• Salt and pepper
• Cooking oil

Chop the potatoes into quarters at least, for larger ones you may need to chop again. Get them all roughly the same size so they roast evenly. Drizzle or spray cooking oil onto a roasting try and pop the potatoes on there. Tear up leaves from the fresh sage and sprinkle on top. Add salt and pepper and then add a little more oil. Start the hot tap running at your sink and use your hands to mix the seasoning, oil and potatoes together coating them as well as you can. Pop back over to the running tap then to wash your hands at the tap without covering your tap in the mixture.

Heat the oven to 180° and pop the tray in. Keep an eye out for the change in colour to see when they're cooked. When the top seems nearly there take the tray out and use a spatula to turn them over and move them about so they colour more evenly.

Cut the florets off each head of broccoli and chope the asparagus into bite size pieces. You can add similar vegetables here or things like kale too. In another tray, toss these together with the crushed garlic cloves, some oil, salt and pepper. These can go into the same oven as the potatoes, but a little later. They will cook much faster than the potatoes. Again, keep an eye on the colour to monitor how cooked they are and turn them over once they begin changing to cook them more evenly.

To preparing the haloumi, chop it into cubes and fry it either on its own ina non-stick pan or with a tiny amount of oil if using a sticky pan. Once it starts to colour at all, flip each piece to another side.

To serve, mix some of the vegetables (without the crushed garlic cloves), potatoes, and the cheese together in a bowl and drizzle some fresh lemon juice over it all.

Swaps or additions: Any root vegetables will cook in a similar time to the potatoes and can be mixed in with them if you like. The greens can be replaced or added to with kale, spinach, string beans or sugar snap peas too.

Tags: root vegetables, vegetarian, halloumi, asparagus, sage, potatoes, haloumi