Beets have got to be one of the strangest, most wonderful vegetables in existence. It’s almost scary to ingest something with such freakishly wild color. But while its color is potent, the beet’s flavor is sweet, mild, gentle, and earthy. They are a mainstay crop of East End farms, spring, summer and fall.
Occasionally I cook the beets and their tops together (risotto is a good dish for that) but most of the time I cook them separately, which is what I did with the lovely bunch of beets I bought at Briermere.
I cut the greens off about one inch from the top of the root. Then I steam-roasted the beet roots. I have a super high-tech Gaggenau steam and convection “combi” oven. It allows you to use steam and convection heat in adjustable proportions. If you use full steam, it works as a steamer. Or, you can choose no steam and it works like a regular convection oven. And you can select an almost infinite range of combinations of steam and heat. For the beets, I set the heat to 360 degrees and the steam level to 60%. This way the beets get the concentrated flavor from roasting but they don’t dry out. (An equally good way to do this in a regular oven is by putting them in a roasting pan with a splash of water at the bottom, covering the pan with foil, and roasting them for about an hour at 400 degrees.)
This is what they looked like after being steam-roasted for about 45 minutes. And there’s a better picture of my salad from Sunday night!
After they cool, I peel them, which is easy because the skins slip right off. Only I do this on a paper plate because otherwise they would stain my cutting board. My fingertips do get stained a little red, but unlike Lady Macbeth, I don’t have a problem with that. I actually like it because it reminds me later of what I cooked. I feel the same about the smell of garlic and onions on my hands. People go to great lengths to remove those smells from their hands, engaging in all kinds of folkloric rituals like rubbing their fingers on the back of a spoon. Not me. I keep my hands clean, of course (I wash them constantly), but if there are some lingering signs or smells of cooking on them, I’m happy.
After I peel the beets, I chop them into smaller pieces and sprinkle them with red wine vinegar and fleur de sel. This pickles them lightly. They last in the fridge for about two weeks.
These marinated beets are terriffic in a salad, particularly as a vinegary balance to something rich like salmon or goat cheese. Or I serve them individually, topping each piece with a dollop of goat cheese and a sprinkling of fleur de sel and pepper. With a toothpick in each piece, passed on a plate, they make a lovely hors d’oeuvre.
I washed the greens on Sunday evening and put them in the fridge for a couple of days in a plastic bag. Then on Tuesday morning, I made some farmhopper weekday food. I can’t give it any other name, because it’s just a mish-mosh of whatever leftovers I have in the fridge thrown together to make something light and tasty that I can serve as a quick family dinner or take to work for lunch. It’s simple, healthy food that I wouldn’t serve at a dinner party but I’m happy to eat during the week.
On weekdays, I like to cook in the morning before I go to work. When I come home at 6 p.m., I’m tired, and if something is not already planned and prepped, I reach for the take-out menu. My wonderful babysitter, who is a great cook in her own right, arrives at 7:30 a.m. and we spend an hour together cooking, planning meals, making grocery lists, and getting my son ready for school.
I once heard Ruth Reichl interviewed by Terry Gross, who asked her how she managed to cook dinner on weeknights. Reichl said that if you’re sitting at your desk at 4 p.m. and you don’t know yet what’s for dinner, then you’ve lost the battle. It is so true.
This was my mise en place: diced ginger and scallion bulbs, a couple of pork chops leftover from Sunday night, chopped, the beet greens, chopped, and the leftover grilled asparagus, also chopped.
I sauteed the ginger and scallions first in a little vegetable oil mixed with a drop of dark sesame oil.
Then I added the pork.
Then the beet greens.
After I added the beet greens, I deglazed the pan with some rice wine and chicken broth, to make it a little saucy. Then I added the chopped asparagus and some leftover brown rice that I had in the fridge.
I sprinkled the whole thing with soy sauce and a few squirts of sriracha, packed one serving into a container for work, and the rest I popped in the fridge for later.
That’s food with legs. The leftover pork and asparagus were reincarnated with the fresh beet greens and some leftover brown rice to create something new, delicious, easy and healthy. And the marinated beets also have legs: I’ll find a way to use them as an element in some other dish over the next week or so.
It’s cooking in layers. Many times when I cook, I’m making something for the moment and something for the future — although I often don’t know what that future will be. As I create dishes and meals, I try not to to be rigid in my thinking: I usually improvise the best dishes from whatever’s left over in the fridge plus something fresh from the CSA, fish market or a recent trip to a farm. The food is cooked, eaten, returned to the fridge, modified, joined with something new, eaten, and returned to the fridge in an ongoing cycle. I do this not to be clever, but because I’m cheap and lazy!
I watch almost no TV these days but the closest I’ve come to finding anyone else with this philosophy was the Frugal Gourmet — that charming TV cooking pioneer from the 1980s (minus the claims of sexual misconduct!) If I can adapt something already made into something new, it saves time and money, and I throw less food away. It just takes a relaxed attitude of imagination and experimentation.
farmhopper 