A summer salad with stamina

            Last year around this time I began training for the town road race. Having never really run before, I found the challenge and the slow build up of stamina invigorating. I’ll admit that over the winter the running sneakers lay dormant in the closet, but now that it’s spring, I’ve been running again, though this is a different sort of cross-training. I’ve been running food from kitchen to tables at the café and racks of dishware up a too long flight of stairs. I’ve continuously cycled lists of career choices through my head and humped laden bags of produce home from Haymarket because I remain too stubborn to use public transportation. I even went for a brisk jog the other morning, screeching across a neighbor’s lawn on my way to work when a rather large squirrel unexpectedly popped out of a window well.

The time for regulated running has gone the same way as cooking, and writing too, it seems, buried into the day in new, and sometimes less remarkable ways. Jogging away from a rather surly squirrel is not as noteworthy as training for a marathon, and reporting that I ate roasted beet salad for the fourth night in a row seems somehow less significant that last year’s tomato and basil garden haul that went straight into the evening’s pasta dish. Still, the roasted beets are a sweet supper, with a bold, unapologetic, earthy taste that fills me up at the end of a long-running day, and a familiarity that is unremarkably comforting.

I like to slow roast the beets whole, in their skin, to get the most flavor. A true test of stamina, it takes nearly two hours for the monster beets I glean from the local Russian deli to soften all the way to their centers. I roast the beets at night, and sometimes, when I find my eyes drooping before the vegetables have finished, I shut the oven off and leave the mammoths to sit overnight in the still warm stove. By the morning the beets are perfectly cooked through, vibrant violet flesh shrinking from the tough outer skin, and fully wrinkled like elderly, bald gentlemen. If you peel and cut the beets first, you can get away with a quicker cooking time, but you might lose a bit of sweet, beet juice to the bottom of the broiler pan too.

Beet and citrus salad

Serves one as a meal, or two as an appetizer.

2 average size or 1 mammoth beet

1 orange

3 radishes

Roast the beets in the oven until tender all the way through. Once the beets are cool, cut them into 1/2” chunks. Peel and section the orange, and cut the slices down into 1/2” chunks as well, adding them to the beets. Using a mandolin, or very good knife skills, shave the radishes over the bowl. Toss and enjoy.

I find the beets and oranges so perfectly sweet that I eat the salad as is. If your taste buds are searching for a refreshing finish, drizzle a mixture of olive oil, rice wine vinegar and honey over the salad with just a dash of salt. For a warming dish, dust the salad with sesame oil and a mix of toasted flaxseeds and walnuts.