Beet and Feta Salad
This FJ contributor has recently moved to San Francisco and has discovered, amidst the dazzling array of California produce, the splendors of beets. One of the “11 healthiest foods you aren’t eating,” a root vegetable that is flavorful and satisfying, and of a reddish-purple hue brilliant enough to brighten up the San Francisco January rain, beets are a winner on all fronts.
This past week I made a beet and feta cheese salad that was hearty, delicious, and so easy. Aliza Green’s nifty little Field Guide to Produce suggested that beets went well with goat cheese, and this suggestion was right on. I consulted several other cookbooks for the basics of roasting beets (which I had never done before), and came up with a simple plan. So simple, that it requires only 5 ingredients:
3 medium sized beets
About half a cup of feta cheese
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
1 lemon
Here’s how you prepare the beets:
Preheat your oven to 350
Scrub the beets clean under cold water
Place them in a baking dish
Pour about a quarter cup of water into the bottom of the dish, to keep the beets from sticking to the dish
Put dish in oven
Depending on your oven, the beets should take around an hour, as did mine. I knew they were done when I could easily pierce them with a fork. When you take the beets out, run them under cold water and then peel off their skin.
Now, you are ready to create your salad:
Chop the beets into cubes of about a half-inch and put in a salad bowl
Crumble or chop your feta and mix it with the beets
Dress with lemon juice, olive oil and balsamic vinegar until it’s just right!
This dish came out wonderfully. The saltiness of the cheese complemented the slightly sweet nature of the beets while the lemon and balsamic gave it a great little tang. (Or, if you’re looking for an even simpler version, try Kevin’s uber-minimalist take on beet salad.)
I served this dish with sauteed broccoli (boil a head of broccoli for one minute to make it tender, cut it into smaller florets, sautee in garlic and oil, add some chili flakes) and with a dill-yogurt raita (sprinkle some salt and fresh dill into a cup of yogurt; thin it with some water); a combination that worked very well. Furthermore, it looked pretty: a medley of green and purple and white. Highly recommended!
