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Beet-ing the cold

A vegetarian soup of sweet, earthy beets underlined with tangy tomato and chunky with potatoes and carrots.


Asked of me at the caf lunchtable - "Is that a container of Jello?"

Slightly more grown up than Jello but nonetheless a brilliant cherry red, borscht was what filled my little Pyrex container.

I'm a farmer's market junkie. I shop around for the deals, but also for the colours. Yellow tomatoes. Red swiss chard. Purple peppers. And beets! No other vegetable bleeds such a wonderful shade and in such copious amounts.


I had a large yoghurt tub filled with cooked sliced beets in the freezer from a beet risotto experiment following a farmer's market visit last fall. The slices had been steamed in the microwave with a small amount of water until a large amount of pink bubbles issued forth as the water boiled over (it washed off easily with water). Using these, I wanted to try a recipe from Allrecipes for a vegetarian borscht. I had never eaten borscht before, but my parents used to grow beets in our garden and make a Chinese-style beet soup, which was quite yummy.

Why had I put off this endeavour since the fall? Laziness - the recipe in its original form seemed a little tedious and cookware-consuming (I dislike doing dishes). So, last week I reviewed the recipe and decided that many of the steps and cookware seemed redundant. I decided I would use a single pot, first for sauteing and then a mass simmering. Everything would be added in diced form and then I would use my immersion blender to give it a quick puree, rather than separately mashing boiled potatoes for texture. One third cup of butter? Olive oil would suffice. Also, there would be no discarding of the beets after boiling them; this was to be an exercise in pink maximization.


Between the beets and the can of tomatoes, this soup was a great combination of sweet and sour. I added a tablespoon of miso paste for saltiness, but salt or vegetable bouillon would have worked equally well. I tried yoghurt on top the first time, but found that I preferred it plain with some black pepper. When I packed the soup for lunch, I sprinkled on some canned chickpeas, which absorbed enough colour by lunchtime to be a lovely light pink inside my dark pink soup.

Recipe:
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2-3 cloves garlic
- 1-2 onion, diced
- 3 cups finely shredded cabbage
- 6 cups water
- 2 carrots, sliced
- 1-2 beets, diced (2-3 cups)
- 1 large can tomatoes (~3 cups, I used pureed)
- 3-4 potatoes, diced
- 1 tbsp miso
- dried dill weed and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Heat oil in pan until shimmery.
   
2. Add onions and garlic. Saute until translucent.
   
3. Add cabbage to onions and keep stirring until soft.
   
4. Add the water and remainder of the vegetables.
   
5. Heat to boil and simmer until all vegetables are soft (about half an hour).
   
6. If you have an immersion blender, give everything a quick blend, leaving some chunks for texture. If you don't, try removing some of the solids and blending in an actual blender or mashing it in a separate pot.
   
7. Add miso, dill and ground pepper to taste. Alternatively, use salt or vegetable bouillon instead of miso.

Adding 1 cup more or less of any vegetables won't really hurt anything. Adding vegetables not listed probably can't hurt either; the original recipe had called for celery and green peppers which I didn't have around.

Roasted whole pineapple

This is a simple but yummy fruit dish. Roasting the fruit whole makes the pineapple seem even juicier and gives it a hint of caramelization.


Bonjour mes amis!

I LOVE pineapple. Its punkish look. Its alluring perfume as it sits on your kitchen counter. How it's assembled like no other fruit. And of course its super sweetness. I only started buying fresh pineapple recently, but I used to watch my mother cut them up at home. To remove what we called its 'nails' in Chinese, she used a spiraling diagonal pattern of small wedges along the exterior to minimize flesh loss. She would toss the fruit in stirfries, but more than a few pieces would stealthily make their way into our mouths before they could hit the wok.

Intimidated by whole pineapples? Just choose the ones that look the yellowest (outside) and smell the sweetest. Yes, bring them up to your nose and sniff. I like to use that technique on fruits like strawberries and peaches as well. If it smells like nothing, there's a better chance that it will taste like nothing. But even if the pineapples at the store all look greenish and smell like not much of anything, roasting is a great way to bring out some hidden flavour.

It's very simple to learn how to disassemble them. The simplest technique is to slice off the top and bottom, then remove its outer skin by sitting it on its bottom and slicing off as minimal skin as possible to expose the flesh while removing the diamond pattern of the 'nails'. Next, cut the pineapple into four quarter wedges (lengthwise). This exposes the fibrous cylinder that runs down the middle of the fruit - the core. Cut down each quarter to remove the core. I like to then halve the quarters (lengthwise) into eighths and slice those pieces into small pieces easily handled with a fork or toothpick. And that is how one dissects a pineapple.


How did the concept of roasting a pineapple come about? I try to be somewhat environmentally conscious when I'm cooking - for example, I will commonly plan so I have roast-able vegetables (e.g. eggplant, yams, garlic) to go with a baked main or if I'm making bread just to maximize all that oven heat. This time, I was roasting a chicken and I had a pineapple from Jewel (bought on sale, of course), so I looked up some pineapple-in-oven recipes. The easiest method seemed to be to roast the entire thing whole. So I did.

Definitely a recipe to repeat. It came out exceedingly juicy, with a completely different flavour profile from its raw state (especially near the skin) due to the roasting. That's a little five spice powder sprinkled on top to give it the oomph factor, but I've put down some suggestions below for other things you might add to bring in the ooh la las.


It made a great accompaniment to the Sunday comics the next day with yoghurt, banana chunks and frozen blueberries.


Recipe:
- 1 pineapple
- something(s) to dress it up - cinnamon, brown sugar, five-spice powder, ginger powder, rum, ice cream, whipped cream, coconut, yoghurt, honey, maple syrup

1. Cut off the top so that the leaves don't burn.
   
2. Place pineapple into a baking dish.
   
3. Put the entire thing in the oven for an hour at 350Cish. If you happen to be baking something else at a different temperature, just put it in at that temperature and adjust the time up to 15 minutes shorter or longer.
   
4. After cooling it a bit - cut it up, cut out the core and skin, dress it and serve. I cut it into ~1 inch rounds and then quarters before coring it.

Thinking beyond dessert and breakfast, this would probably also pair nicely with savoury dishes, such as diced into a salsa or served with a pork or duck dish.

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