The Beeting

Hot off the heels of my artichokes, I decided to get a bit more adventurous and try my hand at beets. Jim and I are frequent order-ers of beet salads at restaurants, so, come on, why not? It's a salad. A cold salad. Leafy greens and beets and goat cheese and some sort of nut. How hard could it be?

I dug out a recipe I had found a while back and sat down to make up my grocery shopping list. Except, the second ingredient was orange juice concentrate and for some reason I wasn't feeling it. Blegh. I've got beets, I don't need any more sweet in my salad. So, I scrambled to find a new recipe, and voila! Easy, 42-minute beet and goat cheese salad recipe? Sold!

Except Giada De Laurentiis is a beautiful dirty liar.

I, too, can make any recipe take just 42 minutes and call it easy if I take out all the cooking that requires over an hour of cooking and/or constant, unwavering toasting attention, Giada you lying whore.

If I had paid more attention, I would have realized that her recipe assumes you magically have cooked beets and toasted walnuts already on hand. I mean, come on! Anybody can throw a bunch of crap onto some greens and make a salad. The whole point was that I needed to learn the inner workings of beets. Which, as it turns out, are surprisingly complex.

They are enormous, ugly-looking things, which you have to wash and trim but not too hard or not too much, lest you break the skin and ruin everything. And then you have to put in cold water and get up to a boil but then down to a simmer and go for anywhere from 20 minutes to 4 hours. But it's not like you can check, because, you know, the skin. If you break it, you ruin everything.

Thankfully, I didn't ruin everything. They actually came out pretty good - skin intact and colorfast until I scrubbed the skin off, whereupon the sink looked like I had murdered someone.

Giada also left out the part about how to toast the walnuts, but thankfully that was only a 5 minute process. Of course, it was a constant-stirring, no-eyes-off-the-pan kind of 5 minutes, but after the first batch that set off the smoke detectors (which, yay! Those new CO-ready ones they installed? Now one goes off downstairs too, and helpfully calls out, "Fire....Fire...Fire" repeatedly. Nothing like running up and down the stairs with a record cover - flat, sturdy, good for fanning - to quell dueling alarms), the second batch turned out quite nicely.

Once I had done all of that, well, sure! Giada's recipe was easy-peasy, and, it actually turned out very tasty, even though I skipped the cherries and my not-yet-ripe avocado didn't ripen fast enough, so I had to abandon that part.

Giada's still a dirty liar, though.