Ode to Beets

The beet is one of my favorite vegetables.  The purplish-burgundy color is the most magnificent, naturally occurring hue of pink on this earth.  The funny thing is the unanimity of my family’s opinion of beets, they find them absolutely skeevy.  “I hate the smell of them.”  “They taste like dirt.” “Ewww, beets and goat cheese, what could be more disgusting?”

Right now they are also plentiful at my farmer’s market and I tend to buy them every week.  I like to roast them at a really high heat until a knife slips through it like a knife through butter.  I like all of my root vegetables roasted on high heat because it’s quick to cook them and it really concentrates the flavors.  I read somewhere that roasting at a high temperature does good things to the sugars in root vegetables.

The skin peels off effortlessly after the beets cool and the side effect of that effort is very ghoulish looking fingers!  I don’t know who to credit for this salad but I make a really tangy Dijon Mustard vinaigrette and toss that onto cubed roasted beets.  Thinly sliced red onion and cubed Granny Smith apples are the final two ingredients added to the salad.

It’s better on day two, after the apples and onions have sucked up all the color of the beets and the flavors of the vinaigrette. 

This is my favorite time of year, when vegetables are so abundant that you just have to eat them with every meal.  I’m going to be focusing on my favorite ways to enjoy the gluten-free bounty of the fall!

Kendall Egan