Beets Again

It's been a bit beety around here lately. That's one of the few things coming out of the garden at the moment. Fortunately, my husband loves beets. Yesterday he asked me what they look like in the ground, so I took him out to the garden to show him, and he said is that all there is? I guess I'm going to have to get some more growing.

So, I harvested three more beautiful beets yesterday and made a salad with the roots and sauteed the greens as well. I cooked 6 slices of bacon at once to use in both dishes but broke that out between the two recipes. I make a lemon-honey-mustard vinaigrette regularly, but I never measure any of the ingredients, so the measurements below are an estimate. I would have served the beet salad with some arugula if the birds had left some for me (whats left of the arugula is now protected by netting). If you want a fancy name for the salad you could call it Beet Carpaccio, it kinda looked like that with the beets arranged prettily on the plate.

Beet Salad

3 medium beets, roasted, peeled, cooled
3 slices bacon, cooked until crisp, crumbled
about 1 ounce blue cheese, crumbled
juice of 1/2 lemon
a splash of white wine vinegar (if using meyer lemon)
1 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon Dijon style mustard
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil, about 1/4 cup
a touch of truffle oil (totally optional but totally tasty)

Slice the beets into thin crosswise slices and arrange them on a plate or platter, slightly overlapping. Scatter the crumbled bacon and blue cheese over all. Whisk the remaining ingredients together to make the vinaigrette and drizzle as much as you like over the salad, I didn't use it all for this salad. If I had had some arugula, I would have tossed it separately with some of the vinaigrette and then mounded it in the center of the plate on top of the beets.

Makes 2 servings.

And now for the beet greens.

Sauteed Beet Greens

Green tops from 3 beets
3 slices bacon
3 small cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon pine nuts
2 tablespoons golden raisins
lemon juice and pepper to taste

Remove the stems from the beet leaves and discard. Coarsely chop the greens.

Meanwhile, crisp the bacon in a medium saute pan. Set aside the bacon to cool and crumble it. Pour off all but a tablespoon or two of the bacon fat from the pan, return the pan to the heat. Add the garlic and pine nuts to the pan and saute for a minute, don't allow the garlic to brown. Add the chopped greens and the raisins to the pan and continue to saute, stirring and tossing, until the greens are cooked to your taste - about 5 minutes for me. Squeeze a bit of lemon juice and grind some fresh black pepper over all. Add the bacon and stir it all in. Taste for salt, the bacon adds enough salt for my taste. Serve warm.

This ended up making about 3 servings.

Sorry I have no photographs for this post, I roasted the beets and prepped everything early in the day and then dashed off to do my regular Thursday afternoon volunteer gig. I get home a little late on Thursdays so dinner gets put together in a hurry with no time for picture taking. The next time I make the beet salad I will try to take a shot of it, the Chioggia beets were very pretty laid out on the platter.