Recipe Venture - Beets

My friend Joanna’s Food Science excursion for this week is below. When she mentioned chickpea patties I immediately became hungry… er, I mean – intrigued. So I looked up and found a recipe for them myself which I’ll be trying out shortly. My recipe is baked and has no oil due to my low fat needs, so a bit different from Jo’s. I also REALLY want to bake up some beets now; I’ve heard they’re a great source of iron that we meat free folk need to make sure we get enough of.

Without further ado; Jo’s post for this week!

P.S. That ‘beet blood’ photo is fricking scary… lol

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After a visit to Produce Junction, I have a lot of parsnips and Yukon Gold potatoes in my refrigerator. I cook with both all the time: in soups, boiled and mashed alone or together, grated and made into fritters or hash browns, etc. So for Food Science Thursday they don't qualify. Thing is, I still have some that need to be cooked soon.

After a little thought, I figured I could roast some potatoes and parsnips with another root veggie I have never cooked before. My choice: beets.

As a kid, we had the canned ones fairly often. I didn’t really like them. But in the past few years I’ve learned I like the fresh cooked ones I've had in restaurants. It’s high time I try cooking them at home.

[In the future, if I'm making a recipe up as I go, I should bring my scale into the kitchen. It can weigh more things than just yarn. lol]

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Lightly oil a baking pan with a lip (to keep the veggies under control). My pan was about 8x14 inches.

3 medium parsnips
2 medium potatoes
3 medium beets

All veggies get well scrubbed. I tend to only peel off the ugly and inedible bits of peel. Then all are chopped to pieces about 1/4 inch thick & 1/2 inch long.

I tossed the root veggies with a little olive oil, about 2 Tbsp. And sprinkled with salt.

Spread them all out evenly in the pan and roasted for about 40 minutes. I stirred them once at the halfway point.

(As I cut up the beets I had an internal battle: to keep the greens or not. I know the greens are edible, but I’ve never had them. I decided to keep them. Hopefully tonight I’ll cook them up. I’ll report later. Cutting up beets also gives you the added entertainment of looking like you’ve been disposing of body parts. Check out the beet blood photo.)

Once they were cooked, they looked amazing. The deep red of the beets had dyed pink some of the creamy gold color of the potatoes and parsnips. I made enough for maybe 4 servings. I put the rest in a container in the freezer. Hopefully they will warm up well. I’ll report on that later next week when I bring the leftovers to work for lunch.

After I put them on my plate, I decided to sprinkle a little goat cheese on top. The slight tart flavor of the cheese was fantastic with everything – the creamy flavor of the potato, the sweetness of the parsnips and sweet almost nutty flavor of the beets. I will make this again and again and again. I’m officially in love with beets.

In the dinner plate photo, the root veggies with goat cheese are the upper left section. The top right features a pair of chickpea patties, and there at the bottom is some fresh baby spinach with a little thousand island dressing. I put some spicy brown mustard with horseradish (Genaurdi’s store brand – one of my new favorite things) on the patties.

The chickpea patties are a blend of mashed chickpeas, breadcrumbs, vital wheat gluten (found by the fancy flours usually), a little soy sauce, olive oil and spices. They’re formed into patties (or a thinner cutlet) and then baked or pan fried. Since my oven was busy roasting, I opted for pan frying. I can post the official recipe if you’re interested. They’re from a vegan cookbook, The Veganomicon. I love them and they are very easy to make.