Photo: Darwin Bell via Flickr
Another ingredient we’ve had a lot of lately has been beets. I like beets–earthy, sweet and nutritious–but I’m in something of a preparation rut. I have only one way of cooking them: roasting them. Scrub, slick with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, swaddle in foil and bake in 400 degree oven until tender. I have been using my roasted beets in an increasing variety of ways.
The Classic: cut into wedges over a green salad with goat cheese and toasted walnuts. Kind of cliche for a restaurant if you ask me, but A-OK at home.
The Italian: diced and added to a pot of risotto, rendering the dish alarmingly fuchsia, deeply complex and less sweet than you’d think. Ample lemon juice and goat cheese balance beets’ sugary side.
The Inspired-by-Zahav: Beet hummus! At Zahav, I’ve often enjoyed a beet-tahini salad, which is chopped, not pureed, but I thought, aren’t those flavors essentially hummus flavors? I just sub chopped roasted beets for the usual chick peas to great (purple) effect. It’s a solid lunch with toasted pitas.
The Desperate for a Fast Lunch: Sort of a variation on the above. I made a tahini-lemon-olive oil dressing for a chopped salad of greens and beets and then stuffed it into a warm pita. What really made it interesting was the smattering of chicken skin bits I added to the mix. This idea came from Fish restaurant, where the chef ingeniously uses crisp bits of chicken skin as croutons in his beet salad. Over the weekend, Dan and I made a batch of chicken stew and instead of discarding all the skin like we usually do, Dan used silpats and our convection oven to make these incredible grease-less morsels that have actually kept their texture in the refrigerator. I’ve got to do a post on these–they are very good. I’ll never toss chicken skin again.
I think I’ve kept it interesting with the beets, but I know I will have many more bunches of them throughout the season. Can any one suggest other recipe ideas? Anyone have a killer borscht recipe? How do you use your beets?
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Mark Bittman’s raw beet salad. Simple, delicious, and you don’t need to use the oven: http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/recipe-of-the-day-raw-beet-salad/
Great looking recipe! Thanks for the link, Yoko.
Hey Joy – we just pickled our farm share beets and turnips, a la Weston A. Price Foundation book “Nourishing Traditions.” If you need/want to, you can use more sea salt in lieu of whey; that’s what we did and the results are delish.
pickled beets
cook them whole covered in water salt/sugar/red wine vinegar some peppercorn and herbs. its better for bigger ones i like the small guys roasted.
Thanks, Jason! I was thinking about pickling the next batch.
i dont have a recipe off the top of my head i remember cover with water this was for like 20 plus large beets, and equal parts (a pint/crab cup)sugar/water/vinegar a nice handful of peppercorns and some thyme bayleaf.
cook till tender remove from heat leave in the water let it cool some strain and peel while warm you can reduce the liquid chill and make a beet vin.
Hibiscus Beet ice cream?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/magazine/04icecream-t.html?_r=1&ref=dining
Beet hummus! Chicken croutons! My world has been turned upside-down. I like to make red velvet cake with beets. It makes for such a moist cake, and you don’t have to use any dye. I got the recipe from the Moosewood Dessert Cookbook. Great post, J.
Inspired by Village Whiskey, I made my own ricotta (including lemon rind) and topped toast points with it and roasted beets (after roasting, I sauteed them in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and added chopped thyme).
YUM. Even my husband said he could make a meal of these, and he doesn’t usually like beets.