Beet Surrender

 Waves at everyone. I've not posted for a while, so here's a little adventure from yesterday.

In our mad scramble at the end of the Time Before, we planted a load of stuff in our garden for the sake of it without giving it much thought as to what we'd actually use it for. One of those things was beetroot. I hate beetroot! However the husband likes it, so now that the baby beets are ready to harvest I had to find things to cook with it. As always, thank you Ottolenghi!

In this case it was Roasted beets with yoghurt and preserved lemon

My disclaimer on this recipe is that I had to adapt it in the finest tradition of the Confined Kitchen as I didn't have any preserved lemon and I didn't have any fresh dill. In this case it wasn't so much due to the confined kitchen as laziness on my part in not wanting to go to the shops to get the missing items, because then I have to have a shower and wash my hair ('cause I'm paranoid and my hair is too damn long these days to be washing every time I go shopping...)

Anyway, I used lemon zest and lemon juice instead of preserved lemon, and I used a bit of dried dill and sprinkled the finished salad with fresh parsley to give some herbiness and greenery to it. Oh and I dry roasted the cumin seeds, mainly because I hadn't read the recipe properly, so I just added them to olive oil afterwards to flavour the oil before pouring that over the salad. 

This was a really easy salad, with the main work being the time it takes to roast the beets - ours were small so took about 40 minutes for them to be done properly - and to peel the skin off them, because really beets are almost as bad as turmeric for staining your fingers. I also roasted a random carrot because the husband likes roasted carrot, and it worked really well.

Looking at this photo, I should have got cheffy and cleaned up the plate, but what the hell - I mean who's going to see it (oh, apart from you guys...)

Ottolenghi says this salad goes well with oily fish, so we cooked some salmon on a cedar plank on the BBQ - see this post. The beet salad got a thumbs up from the husband and as I say again, I don't like beets, so I'll take his word for it for the win.

Apart from that I've had some adventures in pickling, but that's for another post...