Beets with Red Onion Confetti

by April Paffrath

I never ate beets until college. Not only that, I hardly knew they existed. Sometimes we joke around about the first time we tried falafel, or hummus, or samosas—and how alarmingly late in life some of those amazing things can find us—but for me beets were one of the biggest surprises. They weren't part of my family's cuisine growing up, and I don't remember them showing up on the school lunch tray, although school gave us plenty of the ersatz vegetable, ketchup.

One evening in college, my boyfriend (now husband) said he would make me dinner. He's a couple of years older, so he lived in a collegetown house where he shared an actual kitchen with his housemates. I was living in a dorm single and everything in the nearly empty dorm kitchen was bolted down. It hobbled even the most determined cook. So when he wanted to make me dinner (somewhat nervously, I remember), I jumped at the chance to have non-takeout, non-dining hall, non-dorm food—food that was made for me, which is hard to come by in college. In exchange, I took advantage of non-bolted-down appliances and pans and made crepes for dessert.

He made a great meal that night and served...beets! (They were the punchline to a joke, surely, not part of a real dinner.) They were incredibly sweet and so intensely flavored—nothing like I had imagined. He made them simply—cubed with melted butter and salt—and they became an instant favorite. Ever since that dinner, we've made beets part of the regular rotation. I still can't get over how they taste—so sweet but also like the smell of topsoil after a warm rain. The texture is firm but silky, and they can go in so many flavor directions, although my favorite is still butter and salt...beets à l'université, perhaps.

Last week's CSA box had some beautiful beets, both chiogga and red. I put them in a pot of boiling water and let them go until they yielded to the fork tines. I don't go crazy poking to test them out or they leak their red and, I feel (perhaps incorrectly), some of their flavor. I had an event to go to the next night, so I couldn't walk around with red hands and nails. It's hard to avoid the tell-tale beet hands, but I discovered something one night making dinner when I was in such a rush that I didn't rinse my hands after hand-tossing an oily salad: Oily hands take on less color and come clean much more easily. So this time I rubbed a preventative teaspoon of oil around my hands and used paper towels to rub off the beet skin. The skin of a boiled or baked beet slides right off, so it's a pretty easy task.

I sliced the beets into coins and tossed them lightly with oil. Then I topped them with a mixture I made from bright and fragrant red onions, yellow mustard seed, and a juiced orange. The sweet of the red onion teams up with the sweetness of the beets. But it's sharpness keeps the monotony at bay, alongside the sharpness and warm heat of the whole mustard seeds. The orange juice turns it all into a sort of hot vinaigrette for the beet salad, adding plenty of the resonant sweet notes, as well as the acid required to bring it all into balance. 

Not only that, it looked so pretty. We dug in before I took a picture (Doh!), but a dish of beets with a confetti of red and white from the onion and dots of mustard seed looks very festive. OK, to be completely accurate, I started stealing the little beet discs while I finished making the rest of dinner.

When I eat beets for dinner, I always take an extra serving. I need to make up for all the pre-college years when I never had any, I think.

Beets with Red Onion Confetti

• cooked beets, peeled and cut into discs
• olive oil
• 1 red onion, diced
• 1 tablespoon yellow or brown mustard seeds
• juice of half of an orange

1. Toss the beets in a small amount of olive oil, enough to coat them and make them glisten
2. In a tablespoon of olive oil, sauté the red onion and mustard seeds. They should begin to turn translucent, but not fully, so they still hold their form and texture
3. Add the juice from half an orange. Keep on the heat and toss around to mix it thoroughly and get it evenly hot.
4. Put the beets in a serving dish and top with the red onion confetti

Top photo (cc) bdsworld