Beetroot and Blackberry salad

This time of year in Connemara, the hedgerow briars come forward with a luscious crop of blackberries - but blackcurrants work equally well.

We see fig, orange and pomegranate based salads on TV but our own homegrown earthy sweet of beetroot and the zesty sweetness of foraged fruit sing of late summer and early autumn.

It is a great seasonal treat, and you really don't have to forage all that many - its only 200 grams, about a tea mug full.

As an unusual but the delicious combo I would go so far as to call it an almost exotic dish from a small garden plot.

and yet the food miles are minimal for most home gardeners as most of us have a few beets and an onion somewhere in the beet patch.

Great as an appetizer but really, really, really good with cold roast duck, pork or game.
Also, if you freeze a few blackberries now and store some beets, its great with cold turkey just after Christmas.

Iphone pic - slight variation using strawberries and loganberry-applevinegar

INGREDIENTS
1 bunch baby beetroot.
About 200 grams of blackberries or blackcurrants.
Half a small red onion, diced or very finely sliced.
Tablespoon honey - local if you can find it (or caster sugar if you like)
Beet leaves, Bay leaf or mint to garnish

Lightly scrub the beets, remove the leaves - they can be used as a garnish
Boil the beets in lightly salted water

Rinse your blackberries
Melt the honey down in about a tablespoon of water
Gently warm the blackberries in the warmed honey-water until they start to release their colour and soften.

Don't stir the pan, just shake it to avoid crushing the fruit.

Add a little more water by the tablespoon if required, you are looking to create a very light syrup.

When the beets are cooked, drain them and slip the skins off as soon as they are cool enough to handle.

Slice into the beets into rings and arrange on a shallow plat.
Sprinkle over the onions and season to taste.

Spoon over the fruits with a slotted spoon and reduce the syrup a little further.

Pour over the syrup and leave the  dish to cool

Serve with cold game or pork, and maybe use the beet leaves as a garnish.
And as I said before, it makes a great post Christmas accompaniment to turkey or ham

Comments are, as always, most welcome - photos will follow, but it may take a while, left camera with pics at home without downloading them - if someone wants to send some in please feel free to do so.

ADDENDUM SEPTEMBER 2012
These pictures were taken in Holland, a slight variation on the original. I used strawberries - and instead of water, I used a lovely Swedish vinegar - lingonberry and apple cider vinegar - available at Ikea - but it does demonstrate the colours you can expect. There are other fruit vinegars more available in Ireland. Experiment with what fruit you can grow or forage.

Enjoy!

Beetroot Timbales with a cool yogurt dressing

This is a great two for one - Beetroot is a great veg which, like turnip, can be harvested for leaves and the root.
The notion that beetroot takes hours to cook is an exaggeration.
Small summer beets need about 20 minutes.
Large late season beets take correspondingly longer, but only 10 -15 minutes.
Simply by dicing them and fast boiling in a little salty water cooks them in no time at all - yes they will bleed, but after 15 minutes they will be as tender and beetrooty as you wish, with all the colour and flavour.

Combining beetroot with fennel and lemon in this dish gives great contrast and taste.
It's a great, cool, fresh 
The use of Carragheen or Agar-Agar with veg stock makes this suitable for vegetarians but you can if you wish of course use meat stock and gelatin - but I prefer the freshness of the veg stock and seaweed combo.

This is served normally served with a little sour cream - but I find a simple sweet spinach raita to balance the earthy sweetness of the beetroot - or a standard cucumber, chive, mint and yogurt raita, the classic Indian condiment.

INGREDIENTS
for the timbale:
175g cooked beetroot (retain the leaves)
1/2 Tsp or more of Fennel seeds
1 tsp of squeezed lemon
250ml stock*
Good sprig carragheen.

* When I say veg stock, do use the cooking liquid of the beetroot as a base and make up a simple stock.

For the Raita:
200ml / 7fl oz. Glenisk natural yogurt
About 15 small spinach leaves
12-15 raisins - roughly chopped
Pinch of Paprika, cumin, salt and pepper.

METHOD
FOR THE RAITA
Cut the spinach into fine strips
Blanch in boiling water
Drain and whisk into the yogurt
Add the raisins, seasonings and spices and mix in well
Serve chilled.

FOR THE TIMBALE
Bruise the fennel seeds with a mortar and pestle or the back of a spoon to release their full aroma and steep in the stock.
Add the carragheen and bring slowly to the boil
Reduce and simmer with the lid on for about 10 minutes stirring now and again.

Strain off the liquid and season with a little salt and a good belt of pepper.
Add the lemon juice to taste.
You now have a liquid gel, so be fairly quick.
Bear in mind the earthy sweetness and lemon sharpness are muted by chilling.

Ideally you will need 4 small ramekins or wide mouth glass' to prep this.
You could also use a muffin tray or something similar.
Pour in a little of the liquid gel to cover the base of each mold.
Peel and dice the cooked beetroot if you have not done so already.
Divide the diced beetroot between the molds, mixing in the rest of the liquid gel as you do.

Chill for about 2 hours or until the gel is set.

Loosen the beetroot timbales by dipping their molds into hot water and turn out carefully.

Place onto serving plates, and put a little raita on the plate, or use a bowl with a serving spoon to share  - I have always felt it really adds to the enjoyment of any meal to share.

Arrange a little salad around the edge of the plate - peppery watercress or slices of buttery avocado are my favorites but best of all are the leaves of the beetroot around the edge of the plate.

Comments are, as always, most welcome

Enjoy!

Beetroot chips with gammon steak and spanish omelette

Well, the kitchen garden is beginning to run out of food. A few winter cabbage, turnips, leeks, kale, parsnip and beets are about the only staples right now with some Oca ready for harvest.

Already the Aquadulce beans and the japanese winter onions are showing signs of life despite the cold snap.

Its a nasty cold, but not deep. Much to the delight of my resident garden robins I have been turning over the beds to allow the frost to break up the soil and kill off as many pests as possible. All of this under the Robins watchful eyes who swoop down to inspect the uncovered ground for food

Anyway, one recent experiment in a meal was beetroot chips, and it worked out quite well.
I put it together pretty much ad-hoc, just to add colour to a meal of grilled gammon and a Spanish Omelette.
For both the veggies I just use the food processor.

SPANISH OMELETTE
Spanish Omelette is a great standby, it can be eaten hot or cold. With eggs from the neighbours chickens, its a great way to use them up, and very filling and economical.

5 medium potatos - peele and sliced thin, about 3mm in thickness.
3 eggs
250 ml milk
1 Onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped

Fill a frying pan to about 1/3rd full and get to a medium heat
Slowly cook the potato, onion and garlic.
Beat the eggs and milk - season the egg mix with a little salt

Using a plate over the pan, hold the potato in place, tilt the pan and carefully drain the oil into a heat resistant container (I drained this into a metal pot and retained it for the beetroot chips)

Return the pan to a low - medium heat and add the egg mix

When the omelettes sides firm up well, use the plate - over a sink - and flip over the pan.

Then slide the omelette uncooked side down back onto the pan, cook until done.

Some people grill the top of the omelette but I find this just as easy to do.

BEETROOT CHIPS
Cut chips to equal width.

Heat oil to 130C and fry the chips for 8-10 mins or until cooked through but uncoloured.
Drain and leave to cool .



Heat oil to 180C and fry the chips until crispy.
Drain and serve.

I sprinkled the chips with some Spanish sherry vinegar, gives a lovely tang to the sweetness of the chips

The gammon is simple, just grilled on a rack over the sliced apples, plated and served.

As always, please take the time to leave a comment, I really apprieciate the feedback.

Irish Beetroot and Blackpudding soup - Irish Borsch / Irish Borscht

Hot, red and delicious darlinki - from Russia with love, or black pudding and soured cream in this case

Beetroot is a very versatile vegetable, it keeps well in the ground over winter and I've had a good crop.
As I have said here before, there are other options rather than just to boil or pickle in malt vinegar.
In addition to Moroccan style pickles and Kosambir this is another Eastern European staple, beetroot soup - Borsch or Borscht.
It is a Russian staple, usually done with dumplings. Having been to Russia on several occasions let me assure you that they really know about hearty food to deal with cold weather.
Because all the veg and herbs used in this came from my own garden, I am tremendously proud of it.

In addition to the beets I added some red cabbage, another northern European staple that is said to be a cancer-preventing vegetable, as are other brassicas.

If you want just a pure beetroot soup, simply drop the cabbage and make up the weight with more beetroot, squash or because of the deep red colour, it might be cool as well for kids around Halloween, maybe replacing the with some pumpkin flesh, that needs to be used up - call it vampire soup or something equally ghoulish.

This soup is an excellent way to get more vegetable into your diet, and a way of using beets in a really rewarding way. Its also very easy to reheat or freeze when cooled.
I served with home made soda bread, but if you can find good rye bread, use that instead, the sour dough rye really sets off the sweetness of the beets.
For garnish I used a soured and Herby cream.

Using the black pudding is really optional, and it may be better being incorporated in dumplings or as a part of a garnish, but otherwise think of it as a stock cube - and it does add to the depth of this particular borscht and give it a bit of Irish zing.

Its up to you but I do tend to experiment a lot while cooking, and this one does work.


INGREDIENTS
For herby soured cream its easy peezy lemon squeezy:
300 ml cream
juice of half a lemon
fresh chopped herbs
Bang them in a blender, whizz till clotted.
I just had some on hand from a turnip and lemon soup.

1.5 lts water
(What is ideal for this is reserved cooking water from bacon and cabbage, frankfurters or hotdogs)
600 grms Fresh beetroot, peeled and diced. Mine were Bolthardy
200 grms Fresh red cabbage - finely shredded. Mine was Rodeo, but can easily be replaced by other veg.
100 grms Carrot (1 large carrot) peeled and diced. More Lisse de Mieux
100 grms Onion (1 large onion) Peeled, chopped roughly. A good old Ailsa Craig type
100 grms fatty bacon and pork mix or ham bone
4 cloves Garlic peeled and crushed
1 tsp pepper
3 tsp sea salt
Bay leaf
Knob of good butter
Tbls olive oil

The above is the basic, and you will get a very nice soup out of it. But to adjust it to my own taste, and to give it a bit of an Irish twist I altered it a little.

1 tsp caraway seeds (I just like this flavour with cabbage)
100 grm root parsley, Atika, that I grew in the garden. Very typical of eastern European cuisine, Czech in particular and it adds tremendous depth and flavour.
100 grm black pudding - this is a very Irish optional extra, and may be better used to float a small fried piece on top in presentation or work it into dumplings.

Bloody Hell!! Next time I chip beetroot they may end up in the chip pan!!

METHOD
Get the veg washed, chopped and ready to go and prep meats.
Dry roast the caraway seed in the pan
Add butter and olive oil, get it to a good high temperature
Chuck in your pork/ham mix, carrots, cabbage, onion and garlic.
Sweat them off for 5 minutes. Render as much fat out of the pork as possible.
Season with salt and pepper, keep them sweating for a further 5 minutes.
Add 1 litre water and the bay leaf - don't forget, reserve 500ml of water.
Bring to a rolling boil for 10 minutes
Then add chipped or cubed beetroot, and optional black pudding and Atika.
Bring back to the boil for 5 minutes
Add the remaining 500 ml of water, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.
Remove the bay leaf.
Using a strainer or slotted spoon transfer the solids to a blender - whizz until liquefied and return to liquid.
Let it sit on a low heat for 5-10 minutes and serve.

Garnish with herby soured cream, chives and parsley. To add to the dish, as I said dumplings based on black pudding would give it an Irish twist - or to be more traditional, try black rye bread croutons, that sour flavour really sets off how sweet the beetroot is naturally, but its bloody hard to find rye bread out here in the west.

Please take the time to comment, I really enjoy the feedback.

Irish Golden White Wine Pickles

Burpees Golden are a heritage beetroot, but are golden in colour.
Roasted they are milder and sweeter than red beets.

A Victorian variety of beetroot bred by the old American seedhouse Burpee.

The roots are orange-yellow in colour and turn to a deeper golden yellow when cooked.

They don't bleed and stain like red beetroot. Young leaves can be eaten as baby leaves.

The small beets can be used as salad beetroot and then of course the mature beets can be used in salads or cooked as a vegetable.

Eat raw grated, boiled, roasted or pickled.

This pickle was kind of a mistake, I was making up a pickle mix with what I thought was a cider vinegar, but it turns out it was a white wine vinegar.
It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

As with the malt and mustard pickle I roasted the beets instead of boiling them.
From what I can gather on the net, boiling this type can drain all the colour from them.

They came out of the oven a lovely dark yellow.I was worried I would not have enough of them to pack out the jar, so I threw a small Stuttgarter onion from the garden in with the packet.

The pickle mix for 1 jar was:
150ml White Wine Vinegar
100ml Water
4 tbl spoon sugar
1 tbl spoon sea salt (try to get non-iodized salt with no anti-caking agent)
1 tbl spoon honey
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
2 teaspoon dill seeds
4 cloves
5 whole pepper corns
2 cardamom pods
2 cloves garlic
1/2 stick Cinnamon
1/2 green chili
1 cm ginger
1 cm horseradish root.
Fennel trimming root

In the jar I put
1/2 green chili
1 clove garlic
fennel trimming leaves
1 cardamom pod
2cm horseradish root
1cm ginger root.

All the rest was as with the malt and mustard pickle, check it out for advice, links and a step by step on pickling.

It should be interesting, but regardless of how it turns out, it looks lovely in the bottle.

Connemara Kosambir

Well with all the recipes using greens I was at risk of turning into the turnip leaf version Pvt. Benjamin Buford 'Bubba' Blue from Forest Gump, so heres another beetroot recipe.

This is a beetroot salad from Maharajtra in Western India.

Kosambir are very simple no-cooking, mix and match recipes with raw vegetables/lentils, are healthy and easy to make.

1lb of peeled grated beetroot
1/2 cup peanuts and/or cashews roughly crushed
1/2 cup onion finely chopped
5 springs Coriander finely chopped,
(I used Osaka Mustard greens for extra heat)
1 Tsp roasted cumin powder
Green Chilies, finely chopped to taste
Lemon or Lime juice to taste
Salt to taste

If it is available, a little coconut milk can be nice to turn the chilies into a paste.


Just throw in a bowl and mix. If you are grating/shredding the beetroot by hand, don't wear anything you don't mind losing, this is one recipe that men have a right to wear an apron for

Beets are very healthy. A lot of recipes ask that you add sugar, but small beets are very sweet.
The beets and onions have a lovely crunch to them.
Add the chopped onions to the salad only when serving, otherwise the salad loses its freshness.
Its also best served a little chilled, so stick in the fridge for about an hour before serving.

It can be a lunch salad, or a side dish with curries.

You can make it mild or hot.

TOP TIP: Have this mixed with cold leftover rice, especially basmati - delish.

आप का खाना स्वादिष्ट हो (āp kā khānā svādiṣṭa ho) as they say in hindi, but dont ask me to pronounce it.