Raw Kale Salad

Now that I'm moving away from my hometown, I can share this recipe without fear of reprisal.

Stem and wash one bunch of tender crisp kale. (Soaking the kale in cold water can restore crispiness.) Tear into bite sized pieces.

Grate one small beet.

Toast 2 tbs. sesame seeds.

Mix the juice from three lemons, 2 tbs soy sauce, and 1/4 cup nutritional yeast. (This is not a low sodium dish.)

Pour the sauce over the beets. Add the kale and sesame seeds and stir. Eat.

Then End of Beet Week. Beet and Orange Salad.

Man, someday you guys might catch on to my "put fresh vegetables on a plate and call it a salad" trick. Until that fateful day...

This is a recipe where roasted beets would be best- roasting caramelizes things within the beets and makes them taste like something my ancestors ate for five thousand years. Beets can be baked whole in a 350 degree oven for about an hour to an hour and a half. One can use boiled beets. One probably will, if one is not baking ridiculous Christmas foods.

Take two cooked beets, peel them, and slice them. Section two oranges- or just cut them into rounds and remove the peel. The membranes may be bitter, but so is life. Keep the juice from slicing for the dressing.

Arrange the beets and oranges on a plate. Drizzle olive oil about. Squeeze half a lemon over the plates- and then sprinkle on the orange juice. Season with salt and pepper.

Beet Week Continues: Vinegar Pickled Beets

I think that is an oak leaf in the background. This time of year, our sunroom gets treated like a large walk in fridge with chairs. The rest of the year, the sunroom gets treated like a lovely bit of outside with shade and screens. Even C approves of this sort of outside. That is how leaves end up on our tables.

Boil a bunch of beets- using the instructions in the last post. (Here a "bunch" is about a pound of beets.) Peel and slice the beets and place in a bowl. Warm 1/2 cup apple cider or wine vinegar in a small pan. Add 1/2 cup water, 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp salt, and any spices you might feel are necessary. I think less is more in this case- but I am not always right. Stir.

Pour the vinegar mixture over the beets. Let sit for at least an hour- and up to a week. Or, if you have a room that doubles as cold storage for food, throw them out when they start to get fuzzy. One pound of pickled beets is a lot of beets, after all. You'd better hope for secret beet lovers.

Beet and Avocado Salad

Beets and avocados are friends.

My parents will not eat this dish. They have reasons, but for the sake of narrative flow I decree that they think of avocados as part of their cool California adulthood and beets as part of their homey Midwestern childhoods. I think of it as a way to integrate the two; most often when I've done something like trying to make tuna noodle casserole- with only a few modifications- and failing. (No tuna, whole wheat penne, vegetable broth instead of cream of mushroom soup. I don't know why I thought it would work.)

If such a rationalization doesn't make you feel all self-actualizing, you can sooth your palate with the dish's Cuban ancestry. Serves two.

Halve two beets, just cover with water, and simmer until tender. (20 minutes) It's awfully pretty when one of the beets is golden.

Mix 1/2 tsp chopped shallot, 1 pinch sugar, 1/4 cup olive oil, and the juice of 1 lemon. (Or the juice of 1/2 orange and 1/2 lemon. Or the juice of a Seville lemon please tell me where you found Seville lemons thank you. I suppose you could substitute garlic if you don't have shallots.) Add salt and pepper to taste, and muddle the shallot within the dressing.

Cool the cooked beets and peel. If they are a little overcooked, the skins will slip right off. Otherwise, a sharp knife or a vegetable peeler is necessary. (Beets have onion-shaped layers that are tightly stuck together. Excessive cooking makes it possible to slide these layers off easily. Proper cooking has no such advantage.)

Slice the peeled beets. Arrange slices on two plates. Slice a perfect avocado into nice thick pieces. Add to the plates. Mix the dressing and dress the salads- add more salt if necessary.

I might follow through on beet week- I have two more recipes in the hopper, and y'all need to get your beet water from somewhere.

Tom Robbins has a four page rant on how we should emulate beet pigments- but I'll abbreviate if for you: beets will retain their color even in your biological waste products. Do not be alarmed. Art like "Another Brick in the Wall" would be unnecessary if we all ate more beets.

Beet Salad

My excuse for not going live earlier? June. Work has been... June.

I like to have a little salad in my lunch- my parents aren't crazed vegetable eaters, and it's a good way to get an extra serving in. This week, it's going to be beet salad, because I live in the middle of nowhere and being seasonal is difficult.

Crap, the farmer's market is going on right now. Be right back.

Hey, there were beets there! Justified! (Like most lunch items, serves me for four days.)

So grate two raw beets. This will leave you with a lot of grated beet. Make a quick vinaigrette by blending 1 tsp Dijon mustard (I like Inglehoffer)with 1/8 cup red wine vinegar and 1/4 cup olive oil. (Salad quality oil, whatever that means for you.) Add salt and pepper to taste, pour over grated beets. Taste. Adjust. Put in Tupperware so it can sit in a hot backpack for five hours.

It's a tasty little salad- nicely sweet. If you wanted to make it super Californian, you could use tahini instead of mustard and add some soy sauce and sesame seeds. If you wanted to make it Chilean, you'd cook the beets, peel them, and then do pretty much everything else the same.