Beets is one of my favorite vegetables, but I rarely eat them. I almost never buy canned veggies or pickled stuff, so when I pick up beets at the grocery store it's always in a bag, or sometimes in a bunch with the leaves still on. But it takes so long to cook! And I seem to always forget I have them. They sit in the bottom drawer and end up rotting. Tonight I had to throw out half of the bag 'cause of blue stuff growing on them. Yuk. But I salvaged the rest and cooked them all. The easiest way obviously to cook those gems are in boiling water, but like anything else, they end up losing a lot of nutrients with that water. So I baked them in the oven. It takes around 45-50 minutes, for cubes of about 2 cm. in diameter. All you gotta do is peel, cube, lay on foil with about 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil, salt, pepper, and some herb(i used thyme. it goes with everything!). Fold up the foil around the beets just a little, leaving a big opening at the top, and bake at 400F for, like I said, 45-50 minutes. So delicious!
For this salad I used baby romaine, green onions, feta(surprise, surprise...), flat-leaf parsley and chopped roasted pecans.
For the dressing, I made a honey-balsamic vinaigrette:
1 TBSP honey
small squeeze dijon mustard (just to help bind everything...)
1 TBSP balsamic vinegar
1/2 TBSP lemon juice
2-3 TBSP olive oil
cracked black pepper
I mixed all the greens and feta and nuts, with some of the dressing, and added the still kinda hot beets on top so everything kinda whilted and warmed-up a bit. Poured the rest of the vinaigrette, big squeeze of lemon juice and more pepper.
I should definetly eat beets more often...
*on a side note, i've been trying different settings on my camera, so it's totally normal those 2 pictures have different lightings... :)
