Meatless Mondays: Beets
Winter is a great time to get acquainted with root vegetables. This week, I’ll highlight beets. These low-calorie jewels are fabulous cooked or raw, in juices or salads. With beets, you get two! two! two vegetables for the price of one. The beet tops are mild greens that taste like swiss chard. The root is rich in potassium, which can help regulate blood pressure, as well as some of the B vitamins. Raw beet roots are good sources of folic acid, which is needed for DNA synthesis. Cooking beets to death can destroy the folic acid. The deep burgundy color in standard beets is courtesy of the antioxidants betacyanin and betaxanthin, which may reduce inflammation and help prevent cancers and heart disease. The greens are surprisingly high in vitamin C as well as vitamin A. When you buy your beets, separate the greens from the roots and store them separately. The greens keep only a few days in the refrigerator, but the roots can last for weeks (or even months).
I didn’t grow up eating beets, at least not that I recall. When I was an exchange student in France, we eat beets with a mustardy vinaigrette over rice or cold potatoes weekly. The beets would leak turn everything around them a gorgeous pink, and their sweetness contrasted wonderfully with the tangy vinaigrette. They seemed as exotic to me as the thin, nearly bloody steaks we got from the butcher in the small town. The beets my host mother served were pre-peeled and cooked beets sold in vacuum-packed bags off the shelf. Now, you can find them in most supermarkets in the US, but at the time, I had never heard of anything but canned beets.
These days, I buy golden, candy cane-pink, and red beets. In the summer, when I can’t bear to turn on the oven, I grate them raw, toss them with vinaigrette, shredded raw beet greens, walnuts, and whatever cheese is in the fridge for a portable filling salad.
Yesterday I roasted the last of the beets from my tiny roof-top garden. The beets are from a mid-summer second planting, and they never got very big: the largest is walnut-sized. The greens were eaten months ago, steamed with some olive oil. Usually, I peel and quarter larger beets, toss them with olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme, then roast them on a sheet pan for 30-40 minutes at 400 degrees. Because these beets were so wee and the thought of peeling those tiny things so horrifying, I tried steaming them unpeeled in a foil-covered pan with a few ounces of water. According to my research, the skins were supposed to just slip off easily. It worked for the red beets, but the pink ones clung tightly to their skins. These beets don’t have the same richness that roasted beets have, so I think I’ll recreate my French host mother’s beet salad or toss them with some cooked farro, parsley, and feta cheese for lunch later this week. Do you have any suggestions?
Aren’t they pretty? The light pink ones are Chioggia beets. When you slice them across their centers, you see a pink and white bullseye pattern.
