ROASTED GOLDEN BEET SALAD

So it all started with reading a blog...

I know you're shocked, right?  Bloggers are just so creative and the food bloggers blow me away...not only with the food that they prepare but with their photography, as well. So recently I was visiting one of my favorite blogs.....

Eats Well With Others

and Joanne had posted beautiful photos and a recipe for making slow roasted beets with buttermilk bleu cheese, arugula and toasted pecans.  This looked so good to me!  

If you have not been over there to visit her blog, you should totally go over there and visit her. You will be so glad you did. She makes the most incredible sounding food and the photographs that she posts just makes you want whatever it is that she's serving.

So anyway, I shared with you last week that we made a trip to the local Coop Food Store last weekend. While I was wandering around the store, I happened to run across some wonderful organic golden beets.  When I saw them, I remembered seeing the beets on Joanne's blog so I grabbed a couple of them and brought them home.  I hadn't expected to make the beets when I went shopping that day so I didn't have the ingredients for her recipe on my shopping list.  I just knew when I saw them that I had to buy them and I would figure out what to do with them later.

When I got ready to cook them, I didn't have the ingredients to make her recipe exactly and didn't want to go to the store.  I did what I normally do when I don't have the ingredients for a recipe...I improvised.  I knew that I wanted to roast the beets which is really very easy to do and just like with other veggies, roasting brings out the natural sweetness in them.  

To get started with roasting them, I just washed the beets really well and cut the root end off of them I kept the skins on intact.

I rubbed them with olive oil and placed them in a baking dish with a head of garlic that I planned to use with another dish.  I covered the dish and roasted them in a 350 degree oven until I could pierce the beets easily with a fork.  It took about an hour for them to get tender. 

Once the beets were tender, I removed them from the baking dish and allowed them to cool before trying to peel them.  The skins come off pretty easily once they are cooked. After they had cooled, I cut them into chunks.  Slicing them would have worked as well; but, I wanted them bite sized.

At the Coop, I was able to find the most beautiful organic, locally grown baby arugula which I knew would be perfect for this salad.

I, also, found pea shoots which have become my latest obsession. 

Love.

Aren't they beautiful?

They taste so fresh and I've spent the week nibbling on them and putting them in salads and on sandwiches. I am even attempting to grow them myself. I will share more on that at a later date.

To put the salad together, I mixed the arugula and the pea shoots and added baby spinach to round out the greens.

The dressing was adapted from a recipe that I found here on the Savvy Chef blog.  It was a very simple recipe that tasted so good!  We liked it so much that I think I will keep some of it prepared in the refrigerator to dress our salads and sandwiches.

I started with 1 tbsp. of local honey.

I mixed the honey with 1/3 cup sweet balsamic vinegar that I get locally at an Italian deli/market.  Any balsamic vinegar would work fine for this dressing.  This is just a particular favorite of ours.

No dressing is complete without some good olive oil. I added 1/3 cup of it to the vinegar and honey.

Last but not definitely not least, I added grated shallot.  The recipe called for 3 tbsp. of shallot. I assume that was chopped shallot.  Instead of chopping the shallot for the dressing, I grated it.  That gave me all the nice flavor of the shallot without having pieces of it in the dressing.  That worked out great for me. 

A little salt and pepper and a good whisking and it was ready to go on the greens. 

I dressed the greens added the cubed beets on top.  On top of the beets, I added this wonderful local herbed goat cheese that I found at the Coop.   

To the top of the salad, I sprinkled some toasted pine nuts.

It was an absolutely fabulous salad.  The two beets that I roasted were enough to make this salad one more time this past week.  We enjoyed it so much that I picked up more greens, beets and goat cheese this past weekend.  David and I are like that.  We find something that we love and we eat it often. 

We ate fresh......we ate local.....we ate well.

Thanks so much for stopping by to say hello. I hope you have a wonderful week!


This post is being linked up with Seasonal Sunday , Decidedly Healthy or Horribly Decadent,  Mellow Yellow Monday, Hearth and Soul and Let's Do Brunch.