Shocking News in Shocking Pink!

Although it's more accurate to call it fuschia.

I have faced the enemy:

When I learned I would be receiving the dreaded beets with my produce delivery, I started tracking down recipes.

Most of them were my usual flavor profiles, but there was one recipe I picked that, looking at it now, I'm not sure what inspired me to select it.

My friend, the President of the Debate Club, has been a beet booster every since I came out as suffering from CVA (Chronic Vegetable Ambivalence), but when I told her I was making this recipe - Beets with Yogurt and Mint - even her reaction was along the lines of "That doesn't sound so good."

The dish is shredded roasted beets mixed with mint and cayenne in a yogurt base, and finished with fried garlic and the oil it was cooked in.

I can't remember what I saw in this recipe that seemed like it would be a good idea.  I like mint, but mainly in sweets or only in very small amounts in savory dishes.  I like yogurt but sometimes when it's used as the main base of something savory I have a irrational six-year-old mildly-skeeved reaction to it.  I do like garlic and cayenne, but their roles seemed supporting to this other questionable elements.

And the description the recipe author - Madhur Jaffrey - wrote doesn't exactly make it sound like it's going to be that alluring to a beet-o-phobe:

A word of warning: I have a friend who at first refused to eat this dish because of its color, a wild, alarming fuschia. He complained that it did not look "natural."

But for some reason, I did decide to go with this, a reason I like to think is my special innate super-duper recipe picking ability (something I get filled with pride with about when I conveniently forget all the clunkers I've wasted time making).

With apprehension, I roasted the beet in foil, which took forever (forever in Leslie Time = 1.25 hours).  (I know you're not supposed to cook with foil any more these days, but what else do you use for this kind of cooking?  Must research.) 

With more apprehension, I shredded the cooled beet (wearing rubber gloves as I had been duly warned in everything I read about the red juice in cooked beets creating a "murder scene" in one's kitchen) and with yet even more apprehension, I mixed it with the other ingredients.  (I used a mixture of the Greek Gods whole milk yogurt and plain nonfat, more nonfat that Greek Gods.) 

This is what it looked like and this didn't help matters:

I took the teeniest of bites, ready to be skeeved and repulsed.

And I wasn't! 

And upon the second bite, I realized this dish was not only tolerable...it was actually tasty.

It's yet another great recipe where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.  The flavors blend so harmoniously that it's hard to even isolate the taste of any one ingredient.  The overall flavor profile almost reminded me of Mexican food, the heat of the cayenne against the coolness of yogurt, which tasted more of sour cream. The beets seemed completely transformed, with none of that dirt flavor that has turned me off of them for years.  Instead, they were just a rich, almost meaty undertone.

I ate this plain, as a salad side dish for a shrimp and rice entree.  But I think it would be even better as a type of dip for naan or maybe as a sandwich filling with like possibly shredded cabbage?  I don't know how the cabbage flavor would work with this flavor, but the crunchy texture would be great.

I feel like I have just scaled...well, not the tallest mountain, but a daunting hill nonetheless.  A daunting hill made of beets. I think this could potentially be a four-star recipe...but I'm just not ready to jump that far into beet-liking.  We'll see how it goes as I work through the leftovers.

Update on Monday, April 7, 2008 at 05:51PM by Leslie Seaton

Well, while this dish was surprisingly tasty the day of, it doesn't keep well for leftovers.  I think I made it on Thursday, and by this weekend, the beet flavor had gotten stronger.  Today I tried it with naan and shredded cabbage for lunch and while it wasn't off or bad tasting, it no longer had that special flavor that had made it such a nice surpise the night of.  The mint was now a non-entity, so it just tasted of beets in blah creaminess with the kick of cayenne. 

So I still recommend making it, but with the caveat that you plan to serve it with something like warm naan as a contrast to the heat and creaminess (Sarah tasted it this weekend and said the same thing) and eat it straight away.