Two Beets

We got two deliveries of early beets this summer, Red Ace and Chiogga, aka Candy Stripe. It was so hot for most of July that my agenda for using both of them was, “How can I eat these without having to turn on the oven?” A cold soup seemed appropriate both times.
The first was a gazpacho from Patricia Wells. Steamed beets, peeled and blended up with onion, garlic, mustard, and vinegar. Wells describes the flavor as “liquified pickled beets.”

The result was beautiful, but too intense for a large serving. I only had a half a pound of beets, and therefore only made what she considers a single serving, yet I couldn’t finish it. I should have tried lightening it with a little creme fraiche, or having much smaller servings. I can imagine it working very well in shot glasses as a passed hors d’oeuvre.

So when the second delivery of beets arrived, I decided to make David Tanis’s cold borscht recipe, which I made once several summers ago. Borscht is a funny word, and slightly unappealing sounding to my ears. It was not something I grew up eating, and in fact I was subtly trained to dislike it without even knowing much about it. The result is that I haven’t a clue if this version is in line with any authentic Russian recipes, but I absolutely love it, and I can’t imagine why I haven’t made it since that first time. My suspicion was that C. would like it just as much as I did, and so borscht became the plan for dinner, with the greens blanched and sauteed on the side.

First, peel the beets, and cut them into thin slices. You can use any color beets you like. Red ones will produce a much more vibrantly pink soup, but yellow beets or these candy stripe ones are much less likely to leave beet-blood spatters all over your kitchen.

Put them in a pot with garlic, sliced shallot, a bay leaf, coriander seeds, cloves, a bit of cayenne, sugar, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and salt. Cover everything with water and bring to a simmer. Cook it until the beets are tender, 15 minutes or so. Check the seasoning, and then blend everything up–cloves, bay leaf and all.

Strain the soup through a fine sieve, and chill it until it’s refrigerator cold, or until you are too hungry to wait longer. Whisk in some plain yogurt (full fat, ideally), and top with chopped dill and scallions or chives.

It’s sweet, tangy, a little spicy, and utterly delicious. It makes an excellent light summer dinner alongside the greens and some good toasted bread. Glass of wine optional.

Rice Cake

I am becoming a little obsessed with Yotam Ottolenghi. This is one of three (3) posts I have saved as drafts that come from his recipes. And I don’t even have his cookbook yet, because the US edition doesn’t pub until April and the UK one was out of stock at Christmas. (It ought to arrive soon, though–thanks to my lovely cousin Kate.) But what I do have is his column in the Guardian in my Google reader, which is how I have discovered things like this beetroot saffron rice upside-down cake.

Let me just come out and say that I had no idea how this was going to go. The flavor combinations seemed pretty safe, but the actual construction of the thing looked like it might turn into a small disaster in my kitchen. But I had these beets lying around. Beets can lie around in the fridge practically forever and still be ok, but not literally forever. I had to use them eventually and this was the first recipe that caught my eye.

First step, sautee some spinach with a little garlic, just until it’s wilty. Then transfer it to a colander while you get the other pieces together.

Other pieces being, for one, rice. It needs to be parboiled, strained, and then seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon zest.

Then you deal with the beets. They should be peeled and sliced kind of thick. Sear them in the pan with a butter/oil mix, but don’t flip them.

Layer on top some rice, some water, the spinach, and the rest of the rice. Stick a lid on it and cook for a while, before adding some more water, and also some boiling water that was used to bloom (as they say) a pinch of saffron.

Lower the heat and cook, tightly covered, for another 45 minutes. Then comes the tricky part: flipping this “cake” onto a plate. You will want a plate that is at least 2 inches bigger in diameter than your pan. Put the plate over the pan, upside down, palm the plate, and flip the pan over, squeezing together as you do so you don’t wind up with rice and spinach all over the floor.

Thankfully, that did not happen to me, but what did happen was some of the beets stuck to the pan, because my Calphalon was getting old. Never fear, though: Calphalon has what is possibly the best warranty policy in the entire world. Ship them your old pot, with the flaking teflon that never gets properly clean anymore and that certainly doesn’t act as non-stick, and they will send you a BRAND NEW POT. It’s like magic. I swear I’m not being paid to say that.

For the Love of Harissa

I have been craving harissa lately. Harissa is a Tunisian condiment, common all over North Africa (and beyond). It is sweet and spicy and rich with olive oil and hot chile peppers. Try it on bread, eggs, vegetables, meat–I’ve even seen it used on pasta. Much like chimichurri in South America or sriracha in Southeast Asia, there are dozens upon dozens of variations, both homemade and available commercially. You may well have your own favorite recipe or brand; mine is from David Tanis’s book A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes. It’s got fennel, caraway, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and garlic. And I’ve had a serious yen for it the last few weeks. Luckily, my spice cabinet is very well stocked, so made up a batch the other night–and then had to figure out what to eat with it.

Something drew me to the combination of harissa and turnips. I’ve found turnips to be a little astringent in the past–I can’t help thinking of horseradish when I cut them up.  So I thought roasting them (with some other vegetables) would bring out some sweetness, and then drizzling with harissa would add a welcome bass note to the flavor profile of the dish.

“Other vegetables” ended up being carrots, Carnival squash, and beets. I wasn’t sure how beets and harissa would do together, but since it seems some recipes for harissa include pureed beets, I figured it would turn out ok.

While the veggies roasted (with a couple cloves of garlic, some thyme, a bay leaf, and a dried chile pepper), I cooked up a pot of bulgur. This involves boiling some water, dumping in the bulgur, turning off the heat, and leaving to sit (covered) until the rest of the meal is ready. It’s that easy, as Ina would say. You can use stock, too, if you like. I did not, but I added the same aromatics as I did to the veggies–bay, thyme, dried chile. And then when it was properly soaked, I drained it and mixed in some fresh parsley and mint.

By that time, the veggies were all nicely roasted. Note that many recipes for “roasted root vegetables” advise you to cut everything into roughly equal-sized pieces. This is not actually the best way to go, in my mind, in retrospect. Carrots are nice when there is still a little crunch to them. Turnips cook quicker than beets, and both must be cooked all the way through to be enjoyable. Sweet potatoes would be nice, but I had winter squash, and that cooks faster than anything else in the baking dish. Just something to think about for next time.

In the end, this is basically a salad: grain + vegetable + dressing. Normally I don’t bother to write about such simple meals, but there’s so much good flavor in this one that I’m making an exception.

Roasted Vegetables with Bulgur and Harissa
serves 4

1/2 lb each of:
    turnips
    carrots
    beets
    winter squash (or whatever sturdy vegetables you like and have on hand)
2 garlic cloves, lightly smashed and peeled
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
2 dried chile peppers
1 c bulgur
2 c water
2 Tbsp parsley, chopped
1 Tbsp mint, chopped
olive oil
salt
fresh ground pepper
harissa, to taste (Tanis’s recipe is available here, among other places–or use your own)

Preheat the oven to 400F.
Peel the vegetables and cut them into roughly bite-sized pieces, going a little smaller on tougher things like beets and larger on things that cook faster, like winter squash. Toss them into a baking dish with some olive oil, salt, the garlic cloves, 1 thyme sprig, 1 bay leaf, and 1 dried pepper. Roast for 25-35 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked to your liking.
Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a saucepan. Pour in a teaspoon or two of salt, and then the bulgur, along with the remaining thyme, bay, and pepper. Turn off the heat and slap a lid on the pot. Let it sit, 15-20 minutes, until the bulgur has absorbed all (or most) of the water. If there’s still water left in the pot when the texture of the grain is right, strain it through a sieve. Then stir in the chopped parsley and mint.
Pick out the aromatics from both the bulgur and the veggies, and combine in a big bowl. Serve with as much harissa as you like.

In Which Beef Makes a Rare Appearance

Regular readers (or anyone who’s eaten at my apartment) will know that I do not cook very much meat at home. But I found a new stash of recipes online recently, at a site called OrganicToBe, and was intrigued by their recipe for Grass-Fed Beef Short Ribs With Organic Beets.

Now, frankly, any recipe that explicitly calls for grass-fed meat or organic ingredients strikes me as being just as silly as a recipe that calls for a particular brand of tomato sauce. To my mind, it is simply understood that a home cook will always use the highest quality ingredients available to her. If she has access to organic ingredients and can afford them, then great. (And if she has homemade tomato sauce stashed away somewhere, that is always preferable to a jar of something storebought.) But that said, a good recipe is a good recipe, no matter how evangelical (or judgmental) its author. And evangelism in the cause of organic food is something I can get behind. Or at least not stand in the way of.

One of the benefits of not cooking with meat very often is that it makes it much easier to justify spending more money on the high quality stuff when I do (not that I find it difficult to justify spending all my money on food). So I stopped at one meat stand or another at the greenmarket and picked up some grass-fed short ribs. And other than that, I don’t think I needed to buy anything. I ditched the celery, replaced with leeks, because honestly, celery? That is one dislike I inherited from my mom and have not outgrown. What I must do sometime is buy a head of it (is that what you call a lot of celery stalks together? I don’t even know–a bunch?) and dice it and stick it in the freezer, because every once in a while, I need a single lonely stalk for some soup or stew, and I am just not ever going to buy a whole head to use so little, and then watch–and smell–the rest of it as it wastes away in the crisper. </rant> Point being, although celery and leeks have little in common besides color and a general shape, I decided a leek would be lovely in this recipe, and I had some on hand.

First, you season the meat with garam masala, salt, and pepper, and roast it in a very hot oven for 45 minutes, turning occasionally, until it’s browned.

While that’s cooking, chop up the veggies you intend to use–some shallots or onion, some garlic, some carrots, and that leek (or, you know, celery).

You will also need some herbs–parsley, thyme, and bay, a traditional bouquet garni. If you have a teabag to stuff them into, that makes it much easier to fish them out at the end. (Just tying them together with some kitchen twine works, too.)

While all this vegetable chopping and herb bundling is happening, the meat is doing its thing.

At which point you turn down the temperature to 375F and add in all those veggies and herbs, plus a cup of diced tomatoes (fresh is great, but so is canned), a couple of cups of some kind of broth (I used chicken because I always have it on hand, though beef would obviously be good, too, or vegetable), and about a half cup of red wine. Stir in some salt & pepper, plus more ground cloves than you think is really advisable, and stick it back in the oven. In retrospect, I think covering the dish would probably be wise here.

Let that cook for a while, anyway, around 90 minutes. Pour yourself a glass of wine from the bottle you opened. Take a nap, maybe, or catch up on Mad Men. Then scrub and trim a pound of beets and cut them into wedges.

Toss them in with the meat, stir it up, and let it cook another hour, until the beets are tender and the meat is basically falling off the bone. The original recipe says that at this point, you remove the beef and the beets, and then puree the rest of the veggies into a sauce, but that seems like one step too many for me. I liked the texture of having the bits of carrot, and still some pieces of tomato that hadn’t liquified completely. So you can do what you like, but for me, chunky was good.

Beef Short Ribs with Beets
Adapted from OrganicToBe
Makes 3-4 servings

2 lbs beef short ribs
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp garam masala
3 garlic cloves
3 shallots
3 carrots
1 leek

1/2 c full-bodied red wine
2 c vegetable, beef, or chicken broth
1 c diced tomatoes
2 sprigs thyme
2 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
1 tsp ground cloves
salt
fresh ground pepper
1 lb beets

Preheat the oven to 450F.

Sprinkle the garam masala all over the meat, along with some salt and pepper. Place in a dutch oven (uncovered) and roast for 45 minutes, turning occasionally, until the meat is browned on all sides. While it’s cooking, chop up the garlic, shallots, carrots, and leeks into smallish pieces. Also, tie up the herbs with some twine, or stuff them into a tea bag.

Remove the meat from the oven and reduce the heat to 375F. Add the chopped vegetables, wine, broth, tomatoes (with juice), herbs, cloves, and a good amount of salt and pepper. Roast for 1 1/2 hours, covered, basting periodically.

While that’s cooking, wash and trim the beets, and cut them into wedges. Add them to the pot, and stir it all up. Cook for another hour or so, until the beets and meat are tender.

Remove and discard the bay leaves and any sprigs in the sauce before serving.

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.)

Theories & Experiments

I have this theory that if I go more than a week or so without having people over for dinner, I start to get all twitchy. But it’s hard to test, because generally, I don’t go more than a week without having a dinner party of some kind. Sometimes it’s a big fancy to do, with 8 people and multiple courses, but more often it’s just a simple dinner with, for example, two dear friends whom I’ve known since we were born. 

M. and R. were having a pretty rough week for reasons I don’t need to share, and it was a chilly, rainy, March-like day on Tuesday. So the comfort of a roast chicken seemed the way to go. I had picked up a bunch of radishes in the greenmarket on Monday, and I’ve been reading about roasted radishes everywhere this month, so I thought I’d give that a try. And for dessert, the plan was one of my typical missions, responding to a challenge to make red velvet cupcakes, but since I’m me, I needed to find an alternative to red food dye.  So there’s your menu.

And now a brief aside: someone, years ago, presented to me the pyramid theory of relationships. According to this theory, there is one person in the world, one in 6+ billion (what’s the count these days?), who is essentially your soul mate. And if you should be so lucky to find this person, the capstone of your pyramid as it were, you would be so blissfully happy that you wouldn’t even know what to do with yourself. But then, there are a small handful of people (the next level of the pyramid) where, if you found any of them, you would be such an incredibly happy couple that you’d think you had found that first person, the capstone. And so on down the levels, with more and more people fitting each decreasing level of happiness (I visualize the world’s population all standing on each other’s shoulders). The trick, of course, is that you don’t ever really know where someone is on your pyramid, so you never really know if there’s someone out there better suited to you. (The other trick is that most people are not on the same level of each other’s pyramids.)

Anyway. I’m not sure how deeply I buy into this theory, but it has stuck with me for many years. And the thing is, I have no idea who originally presented it to me. None. I’ve asked around and no one is taking ownership. This method of roasting a chicken is similar (see? I had a point in telling that story), in that I no longer remember where I read about lining the roasting pan with slices of bread and sticking the chicken on top.

But in this case, I can attest with certainty that it is a brilliant idea. Stuff the chicken with something flavorful (a lemon sliced in 2, a few cloves of garlic, some fresh herbs), season it with salt & pepper and drizzle with olive oil, and pour a good amount of olive oil on the bread, too. Shove some of the fresh herbs under the skin of the chicken, too, if you like. And what you wind up with is something like deconstructed stuffing. Or (as M. suggested makes more sense) un-reconstructed stuffing. Either way, an hour at 400F later, it’s amazingly good. The bread will get a little singed, probably, but it doesn’t really matter. Also there is no basting, because all the juices that you’d normally use for that get soaked up by the not-stuffing. And if by some chance you don’t eat all the bread at dinner, chop it up as croutons the next day for the best salad you’ve ever had.

(It should be noted that R. served as my staff photographer for most of the night, which is a good thing for several reasons. One, I often forget about the camera altogether when I’m cooking, which makes blogging about meals kind of tricky. Two, he has an excellent eye, even with my little point-and-shoot.)

Now let’s move on to the radishes. I had used the greens for dinner for myself on Monday, in a stir-fried rice inspired by a recipe from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (more on this book later–Farmer John runs a CSA somewhere in Illinois and on the cover of the book he is wearing a bright orange feather boa, which should be enough to make you want to buy the book right now). But that left the plump jewel-like radishes themselves. Leite’s Culinaria (a blog you should read if you don’t) offered up a recipe from Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that seemed designed for this dinner.

Clean the radishes, leaving on a little nub of the greens, and if there are any that are ginormous, cut them in half. Toss them in something oven-proof with a bit of olive oil, a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and some thyme (yay windowbox!), and roast at 400F for the last 10-15 minutes that the chicken is cooking. And you’re done.

Then came the tricky bit: dessert. I love dessert, and I love to bake, but I’m a better, more confident cook than baker. I have mentioned, perhaps, that I’ve been bringing in the extras from recent baking experiments to the dojo where I practice aikido. This makes everybody happy, because it means I don’t wind up eating an entire loaf of banana bread myself (with the justification that it would otherwise go stale), and the uchi deshi, who spend 32 hours a week training, and are therefore perpetually hungry, get homebaked whatever-the-hell-I-felt-compelled-to-make-that-week.

Last week, when I asked one of the other members if he had any requests, he said, without so much as pausing to take a breath, “red velvet cupcakes.” And initially, I said, “um, no, that’s not really my thing.” But then I thought about it, and realized that it’s mostly not my thing because of the food dye (standard recipes call for 2 entire bottles of red dye in a batch of cupcakes). So I started hunting around for alternative, natural recipes. And pureed beets seems to be the thing to do.

I started with a recipe from Beauty Everyday, but thanks to the keen eye of M., who is a much more experienced baker than I am, we made some substantial alterations. She suggested cutting down on the sugar and the eggs, and also realized that the volume of icing was totally out of proportion with the amount of cake we’d be making. So I wisely stepped aside and let her take the culinary reins.

After the last step of folding in the pureed beets, we concluded that the batter was sufficiently cake-like to proceed. So into the muffin tin went this beautiful, almost magenta mix.

And we crossed our fingers for 17 minutes as we sat down to dinner.

But it turns out we needn’t have been so worried. The recipe was a hit (though it occurs to me that if you slather cream cheese icing on cardboard, it would be declared a success). The comparison we came up with is that it’s like carrot cake, just with beets, and chocolate flavored instead of spiced.

And most importantly, the cake is indeed red!

Final side note: I learned in my search for this recipe that originally, the color in red velvet cake came from a reaction between the cocoa powder and the acid of the buttermilk. It wasn’t a super bright red, more like brick or rust. But then cocoa powder began being manufactured using a process called “dutching,” which serves to stabilize it but also changes the pH so much that the reaction couldn’t happen. And by that time, red food dye (a.k.a. cancer juice) was widely available. And then there was no going back, because Americans for some reason like their food to be as brightly colored as possible.

Ok, class dismissed.

Freezer Bounty

A. and C. came over for dinner the week before Christmas, and we raided the stash of veggies in my freezer to concoct a meal for ourselves. Or more specifically, I let A. use whatever she wanted and we filled in the holes at Agata & Valentina, and ended up with a really delicious pasta dish with sausage and veggies in a tomato sauce. Then also a beet salad with goat cheese, pistachios, and parsley, and absinthe ice cream with chopped chocolate truffles.

I seem to be having some issues with blogger, because it doesn’t want me to reorder these photos. And since I’ve already put off posting this for several weeks, I think I’m going to surrender that battle. So in no particular order, here we go.

Here is the finished sauce:

A. had wanted more tomatoes, but I explained to her several times that all that was available in my kitchen was the pouch of what I’d gotten from Winter Sun Farms.

Here is my ice cream maker, hard at work on the base, with the chopped chocolate truffles waiting patiently for their turn to be added:

And the unassembled beet salad:

This is the sauce mid-preparation:

And some action shots of A. at work:

Not My Grandmother’s Rösti

So in spite of roasting and freezing some beets, and bringing some to PA for pre-Thanksgiving dinner, I still had almost 2 pounds left in my fridge. Lucky for me, K. directed me to this Bittman recipe for Beet Rösti with Rosemary.

Rösti to me means potatoes, the way my Austrian grandmother made them thinly sliced and I guess sauteed with onions in oil, kind of like hashbrowns. But I’m always up for trying something new, especially if it’s got the Bittman imprimatur. So we pulled out the Cuisinart and went to work.

The recipe is impossibly simple, although there is some technique involved with the cooking. Grate 2 lbs of beets (and other root vegetables if you need to supplement–I added a potato and a turnip) on a box grater or a Cuisinart. Toss them in a bowl with salt & pepper, a few teaspoons of fresh chopped rosemary, and a half cup of flour.

Mix it up thoroughly and meanwhile, heat a 12-inch nonstick pan over medium heat, and melt in 2 Tbsp of butter. Once the butter starts to brown, pour the whole mess into the pan and let it cook for 8-10 minutes.

Then you have to do some fancy kitchen wizardry. Get the biggest serving platter you have (well, I needed my biggest one–you might have a better stocked kitchen) and put it upside down on top of the pan. Palm the back of the plate with one hand, grab the handle of the pan with the other, and VERY QUICKLY flip it over. If your pan is truly nonstick and you used enough butter and are having a lucky day, you should find yourself with a plate full of a half-cooked beet pancake, nicely browned.

Then gently slide it back into the pan so the other side can cook. It might be a good idea to add a little more butter to the pan first. Cook for another 8-10 minutes and then slide it back out onto the platter (or you can flip it back out if you’re feeling brave).

Top it off with some fresh chopped parsley and serve in wedges.

Finding Uses for Beets

As an adult, I have learned that I like beets quite a bit, but I’m never sure what to do with them beyond roasting & tossing with one dressing or another (honey/rosemary/cayenne, yogurt/ginger, goat cheese & dijon vinaigrette…). M. and I tried them raw, julienned with ricotta and a citrus dressing, and while I found it to be a beautiful dish, it was frankly too bland for me. So I was intrigued when I found Orangette’s recipe for Beet-Feta Tart. Not least because anything in a pie crust is automatically better than the same ingredients NOT in a pie crust.

So we start off with Martha Stewart’s pate brise, a savory version, and with a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flours. Blind bake it. (I should really make something with these chickpeas eventually, instead of just using them as pie weights…)

Then while that’s in the oven, mix up a couple of eggs, 3/4 c. of milk, and a quarter pound of feta, crumbled.

Oh, I should probably put this as the first step, really–the beets need to be roasted and peeled, which will take close to an hour, but can be done a day or more in advance.

Once the crust is baked, slice the beets into 1/4″ thick slices and layer them in a single layer in the crust, to cover as much of it as possible.

Then pour in the egg/milk/cheese mixture.

And bake for 40 minutes at 350F.

The cool thing about this dish is that the color of the beets continues to filter through the eggy mixture. This is what it looks like straight out of the oven:

And then this is a few hours later:

It’s a pretty thin tart, but it’s pretty rich, with a wonderful salty-sweetness from the cheese and the beets.

Whatever You Like, Fried

Remember when J. was staying with me while she recovered from being run over by an SUV? Well, on the last night she was here, she made something called okonomiyaki for dinner. It is a kind of Japanese snack food, a cabbage pancake. The word, J. told me, translates roughly to “Whatever you like, fried,” which is fine by me.

Traditionally, you bind the chopped cabbage together with flour, dashi stock, egg, grated taro root, sweet potato flour, bonito flakes, and whatever else you like. You can mix in meat, shrimp, other vegetables, noodles…the list goes on. Then it gets pan fried with a few pieces of bacon on top (they will finish cooking when you flip it) and topped with bonito flakes, okonomiyaki sauce (sweet, tangy, brown, ineffable), and mayonnaise (ideally Kewpie brand*).

So this week, M. was coming over for dinner, and we had to figure out something interesting to make. I still had that half a head of cabbage tucked away in my vegetable drawer, and she didn’t seem put off at the idea of making something I know very little about. So we gave it a go, working very loosely from this Okonomiyaki recipe (cookies required, and not the good kind) from Just Hungry. For the record, M. is not only a charming dining companion, but also very handy as sous chef and staff photographer.

(The shots that are way overexposed are the ones I took).

My version still needs to be tweaked. I made the (probably novice) mistake of making one giant pancake instead of 2 smaller ones, and it sort of fell apart when we flipped it. That could also be due to the fact that I have yet to have that particular pan replaced under Calphalon’s amazing lifetime warranty. I will also be braver next time and buy some taro root, and maybe even make some dashi instead of just using water. And the ratio of cabbage to batter could use some adjustments, probably. I’ll update this next time I try it, but it’s too delicious not to share right away:

Totally Inauthentic Okonomiyaki

1/4 c flour
1/4 c + 1 Tbsp water
3 eggs
4 oz sweet potato, finely grated
1-2 Tbsp soy sauce
1-2 tsp fish sauce
Pickled ginger, chopped, to taste
2 c chopped cabbage (about 1/4 head)
2-3 scallions, chopped
4-6 slices Canadian bacon (or pork belly, or whatever)
vegetable oil
mayo
okonomiyaki sauce (for sale in Asian markets, or there are any number of recipes floating on the interwebs)
bonito flakes

Whisk together the flour and water, then mix in the eggs, grated sweet potato, soy sauce fish sauce, and ginger. Add the cabbage and scallions and mix it all together.

Heat a skillet over medium heat and drizzle in a little vegetable oil. When it’s hot, pour in half the batter and top with a few slices of the bacon (photo shows 1 large pancake).

Cover and let it cook for a while, until the egg has started to set a little. Flip and cover again until it’s cooked all the way through. Repeat for second pancake.

Drizzle with sauce and mayo, and sprinkle some bonito flakes on top.

We also made this Italian Parsley and Beet Salad from Gourmet. It is an absolutely gorgeous dish, but not as flavorful as we’d expected. It takes ages and ages to julienne the beets when you have lost the julienne blade for your mandoline, and your hands wind up stained red for a day. But it still takes less time than roasting beets whole…

Julienne a pound and a half of beets.

Mix in a quarter of a red onion, sliced very thinly.

Add a cup and a quarter of chopped parsley, and toss with the lemon/orange/olive oil dressing (we suspect there should be more of that than the recipe calls for).

Toss all together and let it marinate a little.

Serve with ricotta cheese.

*Yes, Lindsay, Kewpie makes mayonnaise. I didn’t know, either. The bottle even has a little baby embossed on it, though I hadn’t noticed until M. pointed it out.