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Very Veggie Pesach 2025: Roasted Vegetables with Quinoa and Feta

I love roasted vegetables. They're a great appetizer, especially when drizzled with balsamic vinegar. But if you mix them with quinoa and crumble some feta cheese over the top, you have the protein needed to make it a proper meal!

Like my other last-minute recipes this year, this uses mostly ingredients that are readily available without any special Passover certification.

This recipe is gluten free and non-gebrochts. It can be made vegan by skipping the optional feta cheese but I like the flavor that feta brings to the meal. The feta is just crumbled on top at the end, so if you are serving both vegans and non-vegans, you can simply hold the feta aside and let people add it if they want.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup quinoa (measured before cooking)
  • vegetables sliced lengthwise into strips such as:
    • zucchini or other small squash (yellow squash, baby eggplant)
    • 1 bell pepper(red, yellow, orange or green)
    • asparagus, with bottoms cut off
    • carrots, peeled
  • 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 or 2 cloves garlic
  • a few strings of fresh dill
  • kosher salt and pepper to taste
  • 1/2 cup feta cheese (optional)
  • balsamic vinegar to taste (optional)

Kashrut Notes
  • Quinoa is now generally accepted as kosher for Passover, but certification organizations now generally require Passover certification for it. This can make KFP quinoa hard to find so you may want to talk to your rabbi about it. But seriously, if you're vegetarian and keeping Passover, you probably already have made arrangements for quinoa.
  • Fresh produce is not a problem for Passover, which covers most of the other ingredients: zucchini or other squash, bell pepper, asparagus, carrots, garlic and dill. If you want to use other vegetables, be aware that some vegetables are kitniyot, which are traditionally not kosher for Passover! Green beans leap to mind as something you might want to roast that is kitniyot. Don't do that. Onions, broccoli, mushrooms and other squash are things that are commonly roasted that are acceptable for Passover.
  • Extra virgin olive oil is kosher for Passover without any special Passover certification as long as it doesn't have any flavorings or additives. It's a Passover staple.
  • Kosher salt (coarse-grained salt similar to sea salt) is generally marked Kosher for Passover year-round, particularly the popular, common Morton's brand.
  • Ground pepper requires kosher for Passover certification, but you can use whole peppercorns and grind them with a hand pepper grinder set aside for Passover use.
  • Hard cheese like feta (which is optional) requires kosher certification generally because of the ingredients used to harden it. I am very partial to Miller's brand of feta cheese blocks, which are KFP year-round and are easy to crumble.
  • Balsamic vinegar (which is optional) requires kosher for Passover certification. I am particularly partial to the Bartenura kosher brand of balsamic vinegar, which is certified for Passover year-round.
Preparation
  • Preheat the oven to 425 degrees (note that this for roasting, hotter than normal cooking). 
  • Cook the quinoa according to package directions.
  • While the quinoa is cooing, coat the sliced vegetables and two baking sheets with oil. Arrange the vegetables on the sheet in a single layer, spaced, with carrots on a separate sheet because they will take longer to roast. Put the carrots in the oven while you cut the other vegetables
  • Once the oven is preheated, place the vegetable sheets in the oven. Keep an eye on them, but the asparagus, zucchini and bell pepper should take about 10 minutes and carrots will be more like 20 or 30 minutes.
  • When it's all cooked, put the quinoa and the roasted vegetables in a large bowl. Add pressed garlic, salt, pepper and chopped dill and mix it all together.
  • If desired, crumble the feta over the top and sprinkle some balsamic vinegar on top of that. 

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