Sunday 14 October
Yesterday we bought some fresh red
beets, with their greens of course, from the nice people from Fair Ridge Farms
at Findlay Market. They asked if we intended to use
the greens, and when we said "of course," they reached into a bin,
pulled out another big bunch of greens sans beets, and said "take these as
well." Apparently some bozos asked them to cut the greens off, not realizing that beet greens are as tasty as beets, in their own way.
To use them all, we cooked
up this recipe we'd done once from the Chez Panisse cookbook; but this
time for pasta as originally intended, not as a side dish.
We did tinker with the recipe a
bit: toasted a couple of Tablespoons of pignoli in the dry pan first, set them
aside, and added them to the beet greens as a final touch of crunch. Also, the boiling pasta water served both to
soften the raisins and dress the beet greens.
Orecchiete turned out to be a
great pasta for this, despite the fact that they look embarrassingly like cervical caps. Though they have a tendency to nest on
one another, they still cook pretty thoroughly in twelve minutes; and when tossed with the beet greens, they turned
nice and pink.
The result was nutty and sweet
with beet, sort of Sicilian in savor. Definitely a beet-green keeper.
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