Fall in a Bowl: Brown Rice With Maple-Roasted Parsnips and Shallots

Signs of fall: changing leaves, shorter days, pumpkin spice everywhere, and the desire to eat hearty root vegetables with every meal. This fall rice bowl recipe centers maple-roasted parsnips in a hearty, cozy dinner with a medley of flavor. And everything—even the rice—is cooked on a sheet pan.

Here, parsnips are roasted with shallots until caramelized and spoon-tender, then finished with a drizzle of maple syrup that pairs beautifully with the spicy crunch from the pumpkin seeds, and the slightly sweet orange-mint vinaigrette. Parsnips, whose peak season starts around September and continues through spring, are the star, but any kind of root vegetable would work, including carrots, rutabaga radishes, turnips, kohlrabi, or a mix of what’s in season.

Then, there’s the rice. It may sound improbable, but James Beard-nominated cookbook author, and the developer of this recipe, Raquel Pelzel, has learned how to cook rice in a pan that’s perfectly fluffy. (And she taught us a few other things we didn’t know about how to use sheet pans.) Pelzel calls her discovery “unexpectedly wonderful” and “surprisingly straightforward.” She

The sheet pan rice in this recipe is cooked with chopped dates, which help balance the savory, earthy flavors. All you have to do is spread the rice, dates, and water evenly on the pan, cover with aluminum foil, and bake.

Everything in this brown rice bowl is cooked on a sheet pan (even the rice)

Excerpted from Sheet Pan Suppers Meatless by Raquel Pelzel (Workman Publishing). Copyright © 2017. Photographs by Ken Carlson, Waterbury Publications, Inc., Des Moines, IA