Roasted Golden Beets and Fingerling Potato Salad

Copyright 2007 by Cooking With The Single Guy

Ingredients:
6 golden beets
¾ lb. fingerling potatoes (or new potatoes)
1 cup treviso or radicchio, shredded
olive oil
sea salt

Dressing:
2 T Dijon mustard
1 T fresh lemon juice
3 T extra virgin olive oil
1 T fresh tarragon, minced
pinch of salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Scrub your beets clean and remove the green leafy stems. Coat with olive oil and sea salt and place on tray or roasting pan. Then place in the oven and cook until fork tender, about 45 to 60 minutes. About 15 minutes later, do the same thing with your fingerling potatoes (coat with oil and season with sea salt) and then cook in oven with beets until tender (about 30 to 35 minutes).

Remove beets and potatoes from oven and let cool. For the beets, rub the skin off and cut off any unsightly marks. Cube them and place in a bowl. Cut your fingerling potatoes into bite-size pieces and add them with your shredded treviso to the beets.

In a small bowl, whisk all the ingredients to make the dressing together until well blended and creamy. Drizzle over beets and potatoes and toss to coat well. Refrigerate if you’re not serving it right away.

Makes 3 to 4 servings. It’s a nice side salad with a meat dish like lamb or beef.

Pair with a glass of Riesling.

TIP: Working with beets can be messy. If you have rubber gloves, I’d wear them when removing the skin off the beets because beets give off a lot of colored juices and can stain your fingertips. (Even more so if you end up using red beets.) You can tell the skin of your beets is ready to be removed in the oven when it starts to crinkle, almost like air pockets are forming just under the skin.

THEY GO TOGETHER?: If you’re lazy about cleaning up multiple trays, you could cook your beets and potatoes on the same tray. Just make sure you remove the potatoes when they’re done, because they’ll probably cook faster than the beets. I cook the ingredients separately only because my beets are sometimes really dirty and I can’t totally scrub it all off. But since I’m rubbing the skin off, I don’t care. That’s not the same for the potatoes, so I didn’t want my potatoes rubbing against my dirty beets. (Dirty beets, hmm, that sounds like a good name for a food blog! Hey, if any of you steal that idea, be sure to give me credit!)