So, beets are an scary veggie in my house. I never grew up with them, and my husband has bad memories of steamed beets and cold purple things that looked eerily like canned cranberry sauce.
They are everywhere in the farmers market right now, and when I saw a bunch of golden beets I thought, this is my chance to make things right and have us join the world of beet-eaters.
I believe the main reason that many people are hesitant to work with beets stems from thier tendancy to stain hands, clothes, counter-tops, etc. This is due to betain pigments, which are water-soluble.
There are a few ways to get around this: what most people do to handle beets is to scrub them, wrap in tinfoil and bake, then slice and use for whatever. The other way is to look for golden beets (like I used) which (supposedly) have less propensity to get stain-y juice everywhere. I sliced mine raw on a paper plate with no accidents.
Thanks to twitterbuddy Kcline I had an idea of what to do, something that looked like this.
I laid them flat, basted with pepper, salt and olive oil (standard for a vegetable I don't know how to cook) and roasted.
I know beets and goat cheese supposedly do well together, so I mixed some pesto and goat cheese together and schmeared it between slices of beet. What I got was not...pretty per se, but beet slices covered in gooey melted pesto-y goat cheese were delicious.
And my husband went for second servings.
One veggie down, a world more to go.
2 comments:
YAY! Welcome to the World of Beet Eaters :) I'm really glad you had success, I am going to try my next version of the stack with you ridea of Goat Cheese. I drooled a puddle nearly deep enough to row a canoe in when you told me you were going to use Goat Cheese!
And I LOOOOVE the little Beet Illustration! They are so adorable!
This sounds great! I found that I actually really love raw beets in slaw. If you use a foodprocessor to grate them you can avoid the red mess.
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