One long-standing piece of advice for busy cooks — I’ve suggested it to readers many times myself — is to get in the habit of cooking batches of building-block ingredients on the weekends so you can more easily make quick dinners on weeknights.
A pillar of that strategy in my household involves roasting pans. Every weekend I spend a few hours filling them with various seasonal vegetables, drizzling with olive oil, salt and maybe a spice blend I’m into at the moment and roasting the produce until tender. Between that and the pots of grains and beans, braised or blanched greens, various raw and/or preserved or fermented products in my refrigerator, and my pantry full of pastas, more grains, nuts, oils and vinegars, I can assemble seemingly countless dishes.
There are chopped salads, grain bowls, pastas, soups, hashes, frittati, sandwiches, tacos — you name it.
But I can always use another idea. I got one in Patricia Tanumihardja’s new book, “Farm to Table Asian Secrets” (Tuttle, 2016). She employs roasted winter squash — which I always have around this time of year — plus potato and defrosted frozen peas (check and check) to make croquettes, the crunchy bites so common in Spanish tapas restaurants, among other places. You don’t have to start with already-cooked vegetables, but it’ll go a lot more quickly if you do.