Thursday, September 15, 2016

Beat the Beets

I'm sorry for my recent silence. I was storing up photos in preparation for several posts, and as soon as I got them all collected my internet stopped working. A week and a half later, I'm back up and running, and all ready for several blog posts!

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave me a bag full of beets, and mealtimes suddenly became a race to use as many beets as quickly as possible, before they went bad. I've often heard beets referred to as the "candy of the veggie world". Personally, I think roasted broccoli is the vegetable candy (seriously, even my I-don't-like-veggies friend is in love with roasted broccoli!), but beets aren't half-bad. Pickled beets are always a good option, but I wanted to experiment with other ways of cooking them.

The first recipe I tried was from the Whole30 book. It's basically just roasted beets mixed with slivered almonds, served over arugala with a grapefruit-thyme vinagrette. The vinagrette is made from olive oil, grapefruit juice, garlic, mustard powder, salt, pepper, and fresh thyme. The first night I ate them hot, and the second night I ate them cold as the recipe suggested. I actually liked the beets better hot, but the fact that they were acceptable cold makes them a great take-to-work leftover.

I served the beets with a lemon-rosemary chicken. I had an actual recipe to try for it, but I was cooking with a tight time-limit and little attention, so I just made it up on my own. It turned out okay, but I still need to try that recipe sometime.


My next recipe was also a concoction of my own, after a little Pinterest searching. One hot morning I was looking for a smoothie to supplement my meager breakfast, and used what I had on hand - beets, strawberries, and apple juice. Now, if you hate beets, don't get your hopes up; this is full of earthy beet flavor and is NOT a good way to hide beets. But if you're like me and have a love-hate relationship with beets (as in, they don't rank in your top five favorite veggies, but you don't gag at the sight of them), then this IS a good way to mellow out the beet flavor and get more of them into your diet. The nice thing about using beets this way is that you don't have to cook them first - just peel, chop, and blend away!


The last recipe really is a good one for hiding beets! Beet brownies....yum yum! Any time you can get a serving of vegetables while also eating chocolate is a win. Unfortunately, this doesn't *really* count as a serving of veggies, since there's not much beet in them, but it still counts for something, right? You can still taste the beets in these, but it wasn't BEET with chocolate, it was CHOCOLATE with beets. I topped them with this frosting - good, but I'll keep experimenting. Still, though, these were good enough that after taking them to a movie night (which only four people were at), this was all that was left!


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