Beet Salad With Oranges, Walnuts and Blue Cheese

I was really excited to try fresh beets, and decided to make a salad with some fun add-in's.   I've read the beets will stain your hands if you don't wear gloves, so I picked up some latex gloves in the cleaning aisle of the grocery store.  I think it's more important once the beets are cooked, but I wasn't taking any chances and wore the gloves the entire time I worked with the beets!

First I prepared the beets by scrubbing them, then chopping off the greens and slicing the bottom so they would sit flat in the baking dish.

I placed them in a baking dish in about an inch of water before baking them at 350 for maybe 45 minutes.

I baked them after dinner one night, knowing I needed to get started on the beet experiment but not being able to find enough time to do the baking and make the salad by dinner-time on any particular day.  Then I threw them in a baggie in the fridge for a few days.  But eventually I worked up the nerve to make the salad.  I love trying new veggies, and while I like pickled beets, the fresh beet is a whole new animal for me.  So I put the gloves back on and peeled them.  I wasn't able to just slide the skin off like with a blanched tomato; maybe I didn't cook them long enough for that.  I ended up using a paring knife to remove the skin.  Then I sliced them into eighths.  So far, so good.  I sliced up two oranges and tossed them with the beets, a quarter cup of blue cheese crumbles, two ounces of walnut pieces, and a generous splash of balsamic vinegar, with some olive oil and salt and pepper.  It was gorgeous served over a bed of romaine, see for yourself:

And after I picked the beets out, it was quite good.  I know!   I wanted to love them, I really did.  And my list of "no way" foods is really, really short.  But it just got longer by one: fresh beets.  Maybe.  A friend gave me a beet salad recipe that is different from what I did here, and she swore her kids and husband loved it.  So I will give beets one more try.  It doesn't hurt that they're pretty.

Veggie Crazy!

I went to the grocery store this morning and came home with two new vegetables to try: fresh beets, and kale.  I'll post when I use them.  I'm thinking I'll roast the beets with some parsnips and sweet potatoes; ever since the Winter Vegetable Extravaganza, parsnips have become a staple in my house, right after carrots on the grocery list.  And I'm planning to make kale chips, where you toss them with olive oil and seasonings and bake them.  Or maybe add the kale to a bean dip, with garbanzo beans or cannolini.  Kale's supposed to be good in soup, too, but I have not been the soup-making-freak this winter that I usually am in cold weather.

Here are the two new produce experiments.  The paper towell is to keep the beets, on the right, from staining the counter.

Check this site out: 365 Days of Kale.  I found it on Green Lite Bites in a post Roni wrote about kale.  Lots of info about my new veggie!

I also bought cabbage, celery, carrot chips and cilantro.  And some things that didn't start with "C", too.