Beets and Chard
I received my CSA share on Wednesday of this week but the first chance I had to do some cooking was Friday evening. I already had planned on having fish so decided to make some kind of side dish with the beets. The chard was starting to get “wilty” so I felt like I also needed to do something with it the same night.
When faced with an ingredient which is new to me or when I feel like trying to use something in a different way I start by surveying some of my favorite recipe sites. I have used allrecipes.com for years. It has some great features such as being able to search on the ingredients you want to use, a tool to develop a shopping list of what you need for recipes, and a recipe box to save your favorites. I also like epicurious and Pinterest has become a great resource for finding new recipes, saving them for future use, and then commenting to record how they turned out.
I do have a bad habit of rarely following a recipe as published. Often there is a good reason for this, such as missing an ingredient or two, but most of the time it’s because I know the flavors I like. I use the recipes found for initial inspiration. I saw a lot of recipes for roasting the beets. That is my favorite way to cook vegetables, especially roots. I needed to find something to do with the chard that could be used later and I saw that many people were making pesto with it. So the plan was to roast the beets and pesto the chard! I’ll add a link to the pesto recipe once I use the pesto in a complete dish.
One additional noteworthy fact about my cooking. We have a very limited kitchen so I have to do everything with two standalone burners, a countertop oven, and a microwave. It’s been that way for 10 years now and I’ve made it work pretty well.
Roasted Veggies
Ingredients:
- 4 beets
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 10 small potatoes
- 2 tblspns olive oil
- 1 tspn salt
- 1 tspn pepper
Start the oven preheating to 400 deg F. Scrubbed the veggies and peeled the beets and garlic.
Cut the beets into approximately 1 inch chunks and put them in a pyrex dish.
Cut the potatoes in half, chopped the garlic and then added the salt and pepper and the olive oil.
I love these Pyrex dishes that come with a lid. It makes it so easy to coat veggies before roasting. I just put the lid on and shake vigorously until everything is coated. Just remember to take the lid off before putting the dish in the oven!
About 40 minutes to an hour later your vegetables will come out looking like this! You can tell they are ready when you can insert a fork easily.
We ate them with potato encrusted cod and it was delicious. My husband wasn’t as keen. He didn’t dislike the beet flavor but felt it needed to not be as featured in the recipe. He wanted its flavor to take more of a backseat. We’re going to have to agree to differ on that point.
Here’s your dose of TMI … don’t freak out the next day when you see purple poop 
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Thanks for the recipe Catherine! I have more beets now so I may give this recipe a try.
Hi Mary-Jo, your cousin Catherine (Moya & Dom’s daughter) here in Wexford,Ireland. I love your beets recipe, my husband is a major fan of beetroot so will try roasting them with potatoes. They are fairly easy to get here and are in season at the moment. I have a recipe I’m waiting to try from a guy called Donal Skehan, he’s a young Irish food blogger and cook and has some lovely veg recipes. http://www.donalskehan.com if you want to take a look.
Hope all is well with you and the family. We think of Jon-Marc and all of you guys often.
take care
Catherine
400 g (14oz) beetroot
2 tblsp rapeseed oil
300 g (11oz) green lentils
150 g (5oz) feta cheese
1 small red onion, peeled and finely sliced
handful each of flat-leaf parsley, chives and dill, roughly chopped
For the dressing:
3 tblsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 tblsp white wine vinegar
1 garlic clove, peeled and finely minced
1 tsp Dijon Mustard
sea salt and ground black pepper
Method:
Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F/Gas 6). Trim any leaves and stalks from the beetroot and place in a roasting tin. Toss with the oil, then wrap the whole tin with foil and place in the oven to roast for about 45 minutes or so, depending on the size of the beetroot. When ready, the beetroot should be tender when pierced with a fork
Remove the beetroot from the oven and allow to cool before removing the skin with your fingers or a paring knife. Slice into bite-sized pieces.
In a large bowl, whisk together the ingredients for the dressing and season with sea salt and ground black pepper.
Place the lentils in a small cooking pot and fill up with water, place over a high heat and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20 minutes until tender. Drain and rinse under cold water, then add the lentils to the bowl with the dressing.
Add to the bowl the roasted beets, feta, red onion and chopped herbs and toss to combine. Serve straight away on a large serving platter for people to help themselves.