beets!

Recently, we'e been getting beets fairly often in our CSA share. At first, this was awesome! I love beets! And their greens! So healthy! And then around week 4 or 5 I got tired of beets. I just don't know enough different dishes for beets, I thought.

And then I started looking through photos I've taken of past meals. It turns out I have used beets in a lot of different ways. Here, for my future benefit and yours, are some of the ways I like beets the best:

Roasting is far and away my favorite way to cook beets. You wrap them in foil and back for about 40 minutes, and then the skin slides right off and they have all this amazing flavor. So here are some sliced roasted beets, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, with a raw kale salad.

 ...and of course Bac'Uns, because Kevin loves imitation bacon bits.

I've also made a really simple beet gratin by slicing beets and cooking them with herbs and lots of daiya cheese.

 But where it's really at for me with slicing and roasting beets: making free-form beet "ravioli." A lot of raw foods restaurants use thinly-sliced raw beets as the material between which to sandwich some tasty herbed nut cheese, but I like it best with roasted sliced beets.

 Above, nut-cheese-stuffed beets with an almond cream sauce; below, a very similar dish but totally smothered in a garlicky cashew cream.

 Cooking beets in stovetop dishes takes about the same amount of time, but usually doesn't lock in as much flavor as roasting, so I tend not to do that as much unless the other flavors are very strong. Here is a dish Kevin made, with the beets cooked in a mustard tahini sauce.

 And below, a beets with curried lentils.

 I've also really enjoyed a recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian that involves cooking beets with black beens (and greens, but I think I added those myself).

 After the ingredients cook, you add cilantro and chopped oranges. The flavors worked really well with the beets; I didn't expect it!

And finally, a beet risotto-type dish, with chickpeas and tahini sauce.

I am such a fan of including beets in dishes! Hopefully with this compilation to refer back to, I won't ever again think "I don't know what to do with beets."