Market to Mouth: Root vegetables
October 1, 2009 by Louise Ross
Filed under H & G
Late this summer I spent a week caretaking an urban farm just east of Boulder on Cherryvale Road. It was a marvelous opportunity to source most everything I ate directly from the extensive vegetable garden and the chicken coop. Besides the wonderful flavor of the vegetables and eggs, it saved time and money to walk 20 yards from the kitchen and picking my own versus driving to the store with a list and a budget.
Having had the experience, I can’t say enough about the virtues of growing your own food. Perhaps you already do.
And if that’s the case, perhaps you also have a glut of harvested autumnal vegetables on hand. On the second-to-last evening at the urban farm, I had several girlfriends over and I cooked an early fall meal of barbecued lamb and root vegetables.
Root vegetables are a great accompaniment to lamb. Unlike the delicate flavor of above ground, mid-summer salad vegetables like lettuce, cucumber, tomato and corn, vegetables that grow under ground are typically denser in texture with an almost earthy flavor. The earthiness of root veggies means they’re great flavor pals to the stronger, sometimes slightly gamey flavor of meats like beef, pork and lamb.
From the garden, I picked shallots, beets, baby carrots and squash (with blossoms intact) to go with the lamb. I also picked rosemary, chives and parsley. Since there’s no need to salt the flavor-filled fresh-picked vegetables, I used herbs to add subtle, additional savor.
And with those vegetables and herbs, I made the following: caramelized shallots, boiled beets tossed in kumquat marmalade and chopped chives, buttered baby carrots with parsley, and pan-fried baby squash with blossoms intact. Here, I’ll feature the beets and marmalade because the flavor combination is one of my favorites:
Kumquat beets with chives
1. Wash and scrub a couple of beet bulbs, leave skin on, but remove fibrous hairs.
2. Toss into a pot and cover with water, and boil gently for about 20 minutes.
3. Drain and cool. Once cooled, peel beets, slipping the tip of a paring knife under the skin and peeling it back. Now slice peeled beets into quarters.
4. Toss quarters back into a pot, return pot to a medium-heat stove. Add a glob of kumquat marmalade. Gently stir with wooden spoon ‘til marmalade has melted and coated the beet pieces. Warm the beets through, but be careful not to burn the marmalade.
5. Wash and chop a handful of fresh chives. Spoon beets into a serving bowl, sprinkle with chives.
Note: There are all sorts of delicious marmalade combination available now: orange-ginger, orange-lemon, plain orange, kumquat. Any of these would work well with beets since it’s the citrus bite of the orange, lemon or kumquat that pairs so well with the sweet earthiness of the beets.
— By Louise Ross
Ross, of Boulder, writes a recession-strategy food blog, www.markettomouth.blogspot.com. Here, she shares tips on grocery shopping on a budget and cooking healthy meals with no waste and no fuss. Contact her at markettomouth@gmail.com.
