Quick Marinated Beets

Colorful Addition to Meals

Recipe by Robin

Long before I started Seasonal Eating, I loved making up recipes. Most of the time I just cooked them, but sometimes I wrote them down. I was not an organizer by nature, and had recipes scattered throughout my hard drive and on miscellaneous odd sheets of paper here and there. Often the notes were cryptic, scrawled so that I couldn’t read, much less interpret, my own writing. I lucked out on this recipe though. Hidden as it was in the depths of an old hard drive, it recently surfaced after a major crash and restoration. Perhaps the only reason I suffered the hard drive crash was to lead me back to this simple beet recipe. Maybe.

Polish Shredded Beets: Buraki

Buraki with Greens

Recipe adapted from Polish Cooking

Once again I’ve become obsessed with exploring my Polish cooking heritage, largely as a result of my new cookbook, Polish Cooking, which jogged memories of family feasts from my childhood. Plus we received beets from our CSA this week. What could be more Polish than beets? Not the most popular vegetable in its simply boiled state, the beet can be modified in simple ways to look and taste more appealing—as it is in this simple recipe.

Balsamic Beets with Beet Greens

Simple and Delish

Recipe by Irene

When I asked my Facebook fans recently what they like to do with beets, my friend Irene described this simple recipe as her latest beet idea. I love recipes that combine the sweetness of beets (known as beetroots in the UK) with the earthiness of beet greens. The recipe requires only a few ingredients. It employs the microwave oven to make short work of cooking the beets. While the microwave does its thing, the cook sautés up the stems and leaves. Then beets and greens are combined with a bit of good balsamic. It’s quicker to prepare than most raw beet recipes that require grating, so what’s not to like?

Beet Arugula Salad with Goat Cheese and Pistachios

Arugula Beet Balancing Act

Recipe Adapted from Points Plus Cookbook

Arugula is a misunderstood vegetable, at least at my house. A favorite of farmers and home gardeners because it grows like crazy and reseeds itself, its taste is distinctively sharp if not downright harsh. Throughout the summer its taste gets stronger, until some otherwise easygoing family member might shout, “No more arugula in salads! It tastes like dirt.” While that statement might not be entirely accurate (at least from the dirt I’ve tasted), I can appreciate the sentiment. Arugula’s strong flavor and tough texture need to be balanced with other equally strong flavors and textures. Enter beets, goat cheese, orange and vinegar.

Quick Ginger Pickled Beets

Ruby Red Pickles

Recipe by Recipes from the Root Cellar

Our garden is getting more complicated and time consuming this year. In addition to the new raised beds and the usual containers, I just put in a few winter squash hills and have alpine strawberries and sunflowers to plant. But in spite of all of this springtime effort, we’re  still awaiting the majority of our harvest. Meanwhile we're finishing up our wintery root veggies like beets. Here’s a simple recipe from my new favorite cookbook, Recipes from the Root Cellar. Unlike the Polish-style beets and other hot-dressed beets I’ve blogged about, this recipe is served cool, and is more of a true pickle than a side dish, but with an unexpected pop of ginger.

Shredded Root Vegetables over Pasta

Cheerful and Healthy Root Veggies

Recipe Adapted from Recipes from the Root Cellar

It’s that time of year when it’s officially spring, yet the temperature in our DIY “hothouse” where we’ve started garden seeds was 34 degrees last night. Looks like it will be a few weeks before we enjoy local spring veggies like snow peas, snap peas, and asparagus. In the meantime, we have winter root veggies like carrots, beets, turnips, and parsnips—and most of us are darned tired of them. Here’s a recipe for those wintry veggies that’s light-textured and sunshine-colored, the perfect antidote for a locavore’s early springtime blues.

Golden Beet Borani

Mixing Wok'd Beets with Dressing

Recipe adapted from India Joze

Several years back my husband took some cooking classes from Jozseph Schultz, a local culinary hero who was, I believe, the first to introduce chai and chocolate truffles to Santa Cruz. Using a propane wok burner for extra-super-high heat, he demonstrated a variety of dishes to students, who followed along on Joze’s printed recipe handouts. And then there were the extras—side dishes that Jozseph made spontaneously with ingredients on hand. Students scribbled these down as best they could, and this recipe derives from one such un-quantified scribble. Jozseph is known for using lots of spices in his recipes, but this dish is simpler, perfect for busy days.

Polish Style Beets

Simple, Colorful, and Healthful

Recipe from Live Earth Farm

I know that I just advised you in my last post of November recipes to forego the beets and other root veggies until winter, when locavores will be eating plenty of them. But this strategy doesn’t always work if you belong to a CSA and get a box of produce every week that’s chosen by the farm. True that beets will keep for several weeks in the fridge. Also true that they can be large, take up a lot of refrigerator real estate, and resist being compressed into smaller spaces. After a couple of weeks' worth of both red and rose-white beets, my resistance to cooking them wore thin. 

Cold Summer Borscht: Chlodnik

When Stirred, It Gets Pinker

Recipe by The Art of Polish Cooking

Third in a trio of seasonal beet soups, this borscht features the summertime bounty of old world Poland, the country of my ancestors. Simple borscht, a wintery dish served hot, is made from shredded beets and seasoned beef broth. Spring borscht is served at room temperature. It contains young sliced beets with their greens, along with young dill and green onions, lemon, sour cream, and eggs. Summer borscht is served chilled. In addition to the ingredients in spring borscht it contains meat, shrimp, and cucumbers of the plentiful summer season.

Spring Borscht: Bocwinka

Borscht with Springtime Goodies

Recipe Adapted from The Art of Polish Cooking

Until last August, I was afraid of beet soups, and had never eaten them. Early childhood memories of watching my grandmother from Poland make dark, foreboding soups (that I never tasted) made me cautious. Because my cooking goals for both 2011 and 2012 included exploring my Polish family cooking roots, learning to make beet soup was inevitable. Especially since we get loads of beets in our CSA share.

Pureed Red Beet Soup with Dill

Red Beet Soup with Sour Cream

Recipe inspired by Healing Foods

After my unexpected success with Golden Beet Soup with Herbs, I considered an even greater challenge: Red Beet Soup based on Miriam Polunin’s Carrot Cilantro Soup recipe. Inspiration, or more correctly motivation, came from the two bunches of red beets we have from our CSA, with another bunch on the way this week.

Golden Beet Soup with Herbs

Cheery and Unexpected Yellow Soup

Recipe inspired by Healing Foods

“I wonder how that pureed carrot cilantro soup would be with beets, like the gal from Healing Foods suggested. And what kind of herbs would we use with beets?” I pondered.

“If I were you, I’d start with golden beets and a small amount of herbs.”

Ruby Root Vegetable Slaw with Miso Dressing

Colorful, Nutritious, and Delicious

Recipe by Robin, inspired by New Leaf Market

In my last post, I stated that carrots are more nutritious cooked than raw, because beta-carotene becomes more available after cooking. However, the reverse is true for vegetables high in Vitamin C, which are more nutritious eaten raw. Eating a mixture of raw and cooked veggies makes life more interesting, not to mention nutritious, so this recipe is all-raw. Ingredients are mainly shredded beets and daikon (white icicle) radishes, both high in Vitamin C, plus shredded carrots. What makes the recipe kick is the miso dressing.

Polish Beet Soup: Simple Borscht

The Real Polish Thing

Recipe Adapted from The Art of Polish Cooking

It’s strange that the things that we scorned in childhood can become objects of our quests as adults. Take my grandmother’s beet soup, for example. As a kid, I had a strong notion that I’d dislike it, though I don’t remember any of us grandkids ever trying it. Yet, when our CSA supplied beets week after week, I went on a mission to recreate it using sparse memories from years past.

Roasted Beets with Apple Cider Glaze

Apple Cider Glazed Beets

Recipe Adapted from Various Sources

I’ve tried roasting root vegetables many times and have always come to the same conclusion about turnips and rutabagas: DON’T! Unless they are very small, they are just too fibrous for the dry heat of the oven. Moist heat cooking suits them better. On the other hand, even large beets these days are tender enough for roasting, and this naturally sweet cider glaze plays up the beets’  sweetness.

Mom’s Old World Beets

Mom's Recipe from her Polish Ancestors

Recipe by Mom

After my last post about Mom’s fresh dill pickles, I became nostalgic for other foods that she used to cook. One of my earliest memories is of Mom cooking a Polish beet dish back in the early 1960s, and I’d wanted to recreate it for some time as part of exploring my Polish (cooking) roots. I’d hesitated because the first ingredient was salt pork—not very healthy, hard to find, and I have no idea how to cook with it.

Ruby Red Beet Soup

Beet Soup with Yogurt Blended in

Recipe adapted from Deaf Smith Country Cookbook

I tried out this recipe to explore the kinds of foods my Polish ancestors might have eaten, one of my cooking goals for this Vegetable and Fruit Year. I know that some people don’t like beets, and this recipe is not for them.

Summertime Roasted Beets

Roasted White & Rose Beets on Their Greens

Recipe by Robin

I have a few recipes for roasting winter veggies that I’ll share come January. When we received rose-and-white baby beets this week, we wanted to roast them along with some Lemon Ginger Chicken we were baking, to fully utilize the energy our oven consumes. So I adapted a winter recipe for summer. I substituted apple cider vinegar for the heavier balsamic and red wine vinegars, and freshened it up by using fresh parsley in place of dry thyme.

Sunshine Beets

Yellow and Rose Sunshine Beets

Recipe by Teresa Harrigan from Community Gardens of Santa Cruz

For Father’s Day I was going to make a Polish beets recipe in honor of my late Dad’s heritage, but found a long-forgotten cookbook with a more cheery and nontraditional idea. The Vegetable Gardener’s Cookbook was published in 1979 by Community Gardens of Santa Cruz, to which I belonged at the time. Back in those days, many county parks set aside land to allow redwood forest dwellers and urbanites to rent a space that they could farm. I get sad when I see these spaces paved over today. According to the local paper, demand for such plots is even greater today.

Old School Harvard Beets with Beet Greens

Colorful Harvard Beet & their Greens

Recipe from The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fanny Merritt Farmer,  and Robin

I like serving beets and their greens at the same meal. The sweetness of the beets and the slightly bitter earthiness of the greens compliment one another perfectly. In this Harvard beets recipe from the classic Boston Cooking School Cookbook, the glaze makes the beets taste even sweeter. Before glazing, the beets must be cooked thoroughly. Fanny Farmer, who wrote the cookbook in 1896, advises "Cook whole in boiling water. Young beets require 30 - 45 minutes, older ones 1 - 4 hours. Very old woody beets will never cook tender." Fortunately, modern beet varieties and cultivation methods have reduced cooking times as well as the woodiness factor.