Beet soup

James and I are not a beet-loving people. When we get beets in our farm box we do a bit of head-scratching to figure out what we can do with them that we will like. Last year we found several recipes that satisfied. Earlier this year I spotted a recipe in my Dishing Up Maryland cookbook that had me salivating for beets - Sweet and Savory Beet Soup with Orange Juice and Yogurt. Just the name of the dish had me anticipating the beets we were sure to get in our farm box. I could just see the beautiful red color, and taste the tangy-ness. But we never got beets. I waited all season, and finally this week my patience paid off. There they were - beets. But wait, those aren't red. Is there such a thing as white beets? Yes, there are. And I used them to make this simple soup.

I began with the three beets. I removed the leaves, and cleaned them, and put them in a soup pot with 2 1/2 cups of chicken stock, 1 cup of orange juice, one diced onion and a bit of garlic salt and pepper. Everything was brought to a boil, then simmered for an hour so the beets could cook. After about an hour I removed the beets, and took the skin off them, then cut them up and placed in a blender and poured in the rest of the ingredients to puree. I divided the soup into two bowls and added a dollop of yogurt. This was really tangy. Even more so than we expected. It was served with a green salad (made also with ingredients from the farm box) and home made biscuits. A lovely fall meal.

A tale of two salads

The type food we get in our farm box haul varies quite a bit as the season moves along, and changes from year to year as well. We are still occasionally getting beets, and last week also received some peaches and pears, things we had not gotten in previous years. I did some searching on allrecipes.com to find out what I could build with these ingredients and found two delicious salads.

I made some changes to the, Roasted Beet, Peach, and Goat Cheese Salad, to incorporate ingredients we already had on hand, but was pleased to be able to use the beets and the peaches in one dish. I followed the instructions to roast the beets until I could easily remove the skin. I used more than the recipe called for as ours were rather small, ditto for the peaches, which I cut into small chunks. I added these to a mix of farm greens, lettuce, and herbs from my garden. I substituted a diced onion for the shallots, and included the feta and pistachios as suggested. Rather than make the vinaigrette recommended, I simply sprinkled some of our peach balsamic vinegar from the LOVE Emporium. It was a perfect use for it. A wonderful salad with ingredients I would not have thought to put together. And it tasted great paired with a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Milbrant vineyards of  the Columbia Valley of Eastern Washington.

The pears were well used in the Curried Cashew, Pear, and Grape Salad. After toasting the cashews I mixed them with the melted butter, curry powder, brown sugar, salt, and cayenne. I did not have fresh rosemary, so a used dry, which worked out fine. Again, I used a mix of greens and added the seasoned cashews, the cooked bacon, sliced pears and grapes. I tossed it all with the honey/mustard dressing included with the recipe. This was sweet, tangy, and salty, with a rich variety of textures.

Yet another way to prepare beets

The beets keep showing up in the CSA farm box, and we keep finding uses for them. This weeks "nueva receta" is Beets 'n' Sweets ("sweets" refers to sweet potatoes, which we had to buy, the rest of the ingredients we had on hand). We used onion and garlic salt from the farm box, and used up the chipotle olive oil from L.O.V.E.  Once again, the roasting did a good job carmelizing the beets (as well as the onions and sweet potatoes) which made them sweetly satisfying.We served this over brown rice.One review of this recipe on allrecipes.com says "If you think you don't like beets, you're wrong!" This is now the third time in a row I have been proven wrong.

I must say that yesterday was not really an especially good day to have the oven on for almost an hour, though.

More about beets (and shrimp, too!)

Last week's farm box pick-up featured more beets. As James tells us in his We Got the Beet post, finding recipes for beets that are pleasing to our pallets can be a difficult test for us. Rising to the challenge, however, I found a recipe for Roasted Beets with Feta on Allrecipes.com. It turned out to be a perfect recipe for us in several ways - first we had all the ingredients (once we substituted a farm-box onion for the shallot, and improvised with the variety of herbs we got from the box as well) second, it was quite tasty! Roasting the beets gave them a nice caramelized sweetness. And they were such a beautiful shade of deep red. We ate this as a side dish to our main course, Shrimp Cake Bites which was posted by Old Bay Seasoning on Facebook. I used way more than the 1 t. of Old Bay called for though. I just added until I thought it seemed like enough. The cilantro came right from my garden. I also had no idea what almond flour was, but it seemed to work fine to just put slivered almonds into the blender with the rest of the ingredients. I also used chipotle olive oil (from Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium) to fry, rather than coconut oil. The cakes turned out very spicy, which is just the way James and I like our sea food. Regular readers of this blog know that I do not have a food processor, and instead use a blender whenever a food processor is called for. I will admit that this combination of food did present a challenge for our blender, but undaunted, I kept mixing the concoction in short bursts and stirring until everything was mixed to the right consistency for making the cakes.

We Got the Beet

The Go Go's always had the beet! The Rockefeller Center version confirms that these young ladies are part of our generation.

Readers of this blog might already know that beets are among our biggest local-food challenges. We try to eat all of our vegetables, but the icky texture and the aggressive blandness seem to dominate anything we prepare with beets. Once again, kitchen goddess Deborah Madison came to our rescue, with a green salad based on her "Grated Beet Salad with Cumin" (itself a variation of another salad on page 155 of Vegetarian Cooking for All).

I started by preparing the lime-cumin vinaigrette (p 185), a complex and savory sauce whose flavor could not be beeten. I began by mashing one garlic clove (from our Cochester Neighborhood Farm share) with 1/8t salt in our small mortar. Then I combined this with the zest of two limes and the juice of one lime (reserving a little straight lime juice for the chef!), 2T chopped scallions (also farm box) and half a chopped jalapeño. Then I toasted 1t cumin seeds in a dry cast-iron skillet (Madison calls for 1/2t each of cumin and coriander, but I could not find the latter). I cleaned out the mortar in order to crush the toasted seeds, and mixed them in, then whisked in 1/4t dry mustard and 1/3 cup olive oil (completely forgetting that I could have used jalapeño oil from L.O.V.E. --- more on that in a future post).

Now for the star of this salad, which we improved by demoting it to a supporting role. The recipe calls for one pound of beets -- I knew we did not have that much, but I used all we had, which was four or five small beets. I peeled and shredded them (again, see last year's gratin post for shredder details) and blanched them in boiling salt water (that is, I put them in only for a minute). I then drained, blotted, and sieved them so that I would not have a wet mess. At this point, we realized that -- for the first time in our lives -- we did not have enough beets! We were actually sharing this salad with friends, so Pam had the brilliant idea of combining it with cucumbers and greens -- also from this week's farm share -- before applying the lime-cumin concoction.

The result was actually delicious -- the greens solved the texture problem and the vinaigrette provided more flavor than even beets could absorb.