What is better than finding a new food that you either have not tried or did not previously like? My newest revelation is beets. Yeah, yeah, I know, it seems hard to get excited about beets unless maybe you're checked in to a retirement home.
I never ate beets growing up. Even though my mom grew fresh vegetables in our backyard garden, she does not like beets so they never crossed my lips. I may have tried some beets on a salad bar growing up, but I mostly eschewed beets.
I recently "discovered" beets in ordering beet salads. I found that with mixed greens, the addition of the soft yet slightly firm and almost crunchy beet was a nice addition to a salad. Beets are a little bit sweet, but with an earthiness that you don't find in a sweet vegetable like sweet potatoes or parsnips. Beets are a little like carrots in the way that a carrot has a litttle "bite" to tone down the sweetness. But, I really despise cooked carrots, so the comparison only goes so far.
Although I've eaten beets (both red beets yellow beets--apparently there are some other kinds too), I have never cooked them. The cooking of the beets has sold me on them. I followed the instructions from my well-used Joy of Cooking cookbook. All you do to cook beets is rinse the beets, cut the greens off leaving a little bit of the stem, and boil the beets (increasing the time with the size of the beet; I voiled mine about 30 minutess); you don't peel them (i.e., very low . Once the beets are tender when pierced (just like you'd check the doneness of a boiled new potato) you drain off the water and put the cooked beets in cold water. Here comes the really cool part: the cookbook said to "peel" the beets at this point. I pictured myself with a vegetable peeler "peeling" the beets like you would a raw vegetable. "Peeling" the cooked beets, however, can be done with your hands. You apply a little pressure to the skin and it comes right off! It doesn't really slide off in one big chunk, but it's easy to quickly remove the peel. Even the bit of the stem that you've left on just slides off.
When I compare the beet and the ease of cooking against another vegetable I "discovered" recently, the sun choke, the beet is far easier to prepare. Sun chokes require peeling when raw and have lots of crevices (kind of like ginger root or a really funky potato). This ease of preparation is a big plus and will probably mean that I have beets on the plate or in my salads with some frequency.
The carb-count on beets isn't super-low, but beets have about 2/3 the carb count of the equivalent amount of parsnips and are well below potatoes or onions in terms of carbs.
I know there isn't much of a recipe here. Tonight I just boiled the beets in some salted water, then sliced one of the beets into cubes and ate it as a side with my grilled asparagus and blue cheese filled hamburger patty. Super simple, but tasty.
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