Spicy Sweet

This week, we received our first beets of the season. It’s still pretty early, so they were smallish beets, and came (thankfully) with the greens still attached. The first time I ever cooked beets was in a continuing ed cooking class at Johnson & Wales. We boiled them, peeled them, sliced into wedges, and tossed with a honey/rosemary/cayenne sauce, and they were wonderful. I still find that I like that sweet/spicy combination to go with the rich earthiness of beets, and so I settled on a recipe for Orange Aioli with Grains and Roasted Beets for dinner the other night. Note that there are rather a lot of steps involved, 2 things that need to go in the oven, and unless you have leftover barley, 2 things on the stovetop. So a normal person might choose NOT to make this on a day when it’s 100F outside. But normal is not something I’ve ever been accused of impersonating. And one of the lovely things about living alone is that you can cook whatever you damn well please for dinner. Which I do, regularly.

The first thing to do is peel an orange or two with a vegetable peeler. It doesn’t matter what shape the strips are, though I found it was easier to go around the orange, latitudinally. (Which is not to say I didn’t scrape a finger or two on the peeler…) Place the strips on a baking sheet and cook for about 45 minutes at 250F, until they are thoroughly dried and quite hard. Let them cool, and then grind them up. You’ll need about a tablespoon, which seemed to be only 1 orange’s worth, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something fun to do with the rest.

Also the first thing to do is roast your beets. Or boil them. Whatever. My preferred method is to clean them, leaving the root and about an inch of stems, and put them in a baking dish with a half inch of water. Cover with parchment and foil (can’t honestly say why both are necessary, but it works) and bake as long as you need, depending on the size of the beets. I started mine about halfway through baking the orange peel, and then raised the temperature to 375 or 400F for another half hour, and they were perfect. When you pull them out, though, watch out for steam when you peel back the foil & parchment. Steam burns are a bitch and a half.

While the oven is doing its various things, throw some garlic and salt in a mortar & pestle and mash the shit out of it. Drizzle in a teaspoon of lemon juice and let it sit.

Then you can get on with steaming the beet greens (washed thoroughly, stems cut off). Note that if you are using red beets, even the leaves have enough pigment in them to turn the water pink. Neat!

Step three (or four? I’ve lost track) is the aioli. Which is Spanish for “spicy, garlicky mayonnaise.” Start with an egg and a teaspoon of mustard in the Cuisinart (you CAN do it with just a whisk, but I don’t recommend it. a blender would probably work fine, though).

Once that’s combined, leave the machine running and slowly drizzle in a half cup of vegetable oil (something neutral–I used grapeseed) and a quarter cup of olive oil. Observe the wonderful process of emulsion in all its glory. Finish off with the ground orange peel, the garlic/salt/lemon mix, and a bit more lemon juice.

Note that if you like your mayo especially spicy, just add more garlic. There is a strange thing that happens with raw garlic, which is that the finer you mince it, the spicier it gets. Something about breaking down cell walls and releasing some chemical? I don’t know. Ask Hal McGee.

Then it’s just a matter of tossing things together. Namely, the roasted beets (cut into wedges), the steamed greens, some barley (which was conveniently leftover in my fridge)

and the aioli.

Also check for seasoning.  Shockingly, I did NOT oversalt anything here, which meant that when I ate the leftovers for lunch the next day, cold, they were a bit more bland than I’d like.

I still have a bit of the aioli left, now, and I can’t decide what’s going to happen to it. It would be amazing with asparagus, which is no longer in season. Or potatoes. Or on a ham sandwich, if I had some ham… (That one was for you, Dad.)