Seeing Red: It's Beet Week

A bountiful trip to the farmer's market, made in necessary that this be Beet Week!

Beets are a fairly polarizing food— sure they sometimes like dirt, but they are the most amazing shade of fuschia (and who doesn't love eating colors!?)! I discovered beets just a few years back and immediately began a love affair with them. Cold, roasted, or pickled, all of detoxifying nutrients and all fine by me.

So let's see what happened this week. 

Beet Chips
With a little experimentation, and my Top Chips trays, I learned that in about 3.5 minutes a beet becomes a chip. A really beautiful chip, with concentric rings and slight ruffling at the edges. Think Terra Chips. This was an amazing snack and a quick easy way to eat a beet.  


Beet Bread with Cream Cheese Swirl
For anyone who doesn't like beets, this might be the bread is for you, it tastes nothing like beets—in fact it's rather bland. It's also a bland color. Which I don't understand, seeing as the puree was such a magnificent, velvety fuchsia. 

Look at what it looked like on the recipe where I pulled the recipe. Purple beetiness!

So the bread had fine texture and might be fine smeared with butter and jam, it's just entirely lacking in flavor (and rich beety color!), which makes it completely undesirable to me. I'm not sure what went wrong here. 

But to go along with bland bread, I made a Russian Beet Salad – which was anything but bland. Since I decided to substitute the red cabbage for radicchio*, this salad was zinging all over the place. 

This salad was basically a flavorful slaw. I'd leave out the potato hashbrown things next time (weird?) and add apples instead. But it's a good way to use a raw beet and overall was pretty refreshing. 

It's back to the farmer's market on Friday, so we'll see what recipes get unearthed next week!


*I made this decision based on the fact that cabbage and radicchio were the same color and the Radicchio was cuter. Turns out radicchio is basically radish flavored lettuce. Zing.