I may have spelt that wrong, I believe it was Duncan's line in Macbeth. I do know it was from Macbeth as it was continually quoted during my childhood. We lived on Burnhamthorpe Road, but I digress.
I was channeling Lady Macbeth this weekend, by cooking beets. If you have ever contemplated murder, peel a few beets and you might just get it out of your system. Its the closest most of us will ever come to oozing sanguine out of a living thing , other then CSI I suppose, and really that's a good thing.
Beets are something you either love or hate. I happen to love them either roasted or pickled, red or golden, canned or fresh. In France you can buy them in fours pre-roasted and peeled in a shrink wrapped package. Take them home and slice them up into almost anything.
I particularly love them cold, in salads and turning everything around them a delightful shade of pink.
One of our very first dinners with "the husband" as new house owners was a beet dressing on Boston lettuce from Martha Stewart. I processed it in a too small mini chopper and it went everywhere in the the kitchen and on me. Undaunted and slightly pinker I poured this magenta sauce over the bright chartreuse leaves of lettuce and it looked like something off a Disney set. Our guests came running to see the what the "oh my goodness that's a bit strange looking" thing was in the kitchen. It tasted good though.
Here is my Garlicky Pink Salad.
I bunch of beets. (3-6 depending on the size)
salt and pepper
3/4 cup of walnut halves
Juice of 1/2 lemon
roughly the same amount of Walnut oil ( or Olive Oil if you have not)
1 garlic clove
3/4 cup of Balkan yogurt (optional)
Place the beets in a baking dish with a lid, lightly season with salt and pepper. Pour enough water in the bottom to cover the bottom by about 1cm. Put the lid on and roast for about 1 hour at 400' or until tender. Remove from the oven and let cool. Toast the walnut halves for about 8 minutes until fragrant, remove from oven and let cool.
Combine, lemon juice and oil and grate the clove of the garlic into it.
Peel the beets and roughly chop, crumble the walnut meats in your hands into the beets and the juice and lemon and carefully combine. Season with salt and pepper. Gently but firmly stir in the yogurt and let the flavours mingle for about an hour in fridge if its wildly hot or at room temp if not so.
You could stop finish the salad before the yogurt bit but you would miss the lovely pinkness of it all or crumble feta cheese instead.
Blast some 'Pink' on the ipod and get this party started, just for the heck of it.
