Beets (Let's Not State the Obvious)

Asparagus makes your pee smell, and I know from working at a daycare that eating too many beets can make something else strange happen--let's leave it at that they don't say "beet red" for nothing.

I grabbed these beets on a whim at the last farmer's market of the summer. I don't know what I planned to do with them--would they make a great centerpiece for a autumn-themed table setting, floating in a vase of water with a couple candels--because nothing in the world sparked my interest. Every recipe I saw just made me think of soggy vegetables from the 1950s cooked in bad vinegar--this is the only reason my mom will not eat certain foods, including every single kind of bean (except for baked and in chili).

After what seemed like the longest week in the history of work, the only thing you can do is what you know. And what I know is that everything works when fried in olive oil and doused with salt and pepper--thank you Spain for teaching me that valuable lesson.

Lucky for me, I also bought a bag of sweet potatoes at the farmer's market, so I knew ahead of time that even if the beets were awful at least I could still eat the sweet potato fries. The beets and the sweet potatoes went together like peanut butter and jelly--both barely sweet and of similar texture. And to fancy things up I made a basil aioli.

Friday at 6 p.m., sitting at the kitchen table was a sigh of relief. I was so emotionally exhausted from the past several weeks that I could have fallen asleep right then. Thankfully in the world of periodicals, you get to start again on a clean slate every week/month/day (depending).

Beets a la Sweet Potato:

2 beets
4 small sweet potatoes
olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper

(I peeled the beets, and its juice ran all over.) Slice the beets and sweet potatoes so that they are all a similar size. In a medium sauce pan, heat oil on medium. Saute beets and potatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper until potatoes are cooked through. I like mine crispy, so you'll want to cook them just shy of burnt.

Now, I'm not great cook, but I will vouch for the effectiveness of good salt and freshly ground pepper. When cooking, I use either coarse Kosher salt or sea salt (for baking I just use regular iodized salt) and a pepper mill. I've had this container of Kosher salt for probably two years and still have a ton left. And Meg and I have both been using sea salt and black pepper mills for probably almost a year and they still aren't even halfway gone. No excuse for not getting good salt.

Basil Aioli:
1 egg yolk
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped or minced
salt and pepper
1 teaspoon basil leaves
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice

In a small bowl, combine egg, garlic, salt and pepper, basil, dijon mustard and vinegar. Whisk together until consistency is relatively smooth. While whisking, slowly pour olive oil into the egg mixture. You do not need to accurately measure the oil, just keep adding it very slowly and whisking very quickly until the mixture thickens. Stop once the aioli is thick. Taste. Add lemon juice. Taste again. Add salt and pepper to your preference.

Salmon with Aioli and Leeks

You could say it is a New Year's resolution of mine to cook more French food and less Italian. And now that I think of it, why? Italian food is quite delicious, and I pretty much know what I'm doing. I'm familiar with the ingredients and techniques, yet there is still so much I haven't cooked, so many territories yet to be discovered, enjoyed and documented. And I'm so much less likely to biff things up. But that would be so boring--delicious, but boring. I got a couple French cookbooks for Christmas, and I wasted no time jumping into a braised lentils recipe one dark and lonely night a couple weeks ago. But then friends called and I was out eating Creole rice with them mid-preparation. As a result (or maybe because of some other fluke), the lentil were heinous and inedible. Well, I did eat them, but I didn't enjoy it. And then I tried to bring the leftovers to work and the smell solicited dry heaves.

But instead of giving up, I went straight for the gold, the quintessential French accoutrement: aioli. Made of garlic and olive oil, what's not to like about the sauce? Well, there's a thickening process for one thing, and that always makes me nervous (unnecessarily in this case, and now I'm fascinated with emulsifying). And raw egg yolks, hmm, fishy. I'm no chef, but I'm pretty sure the lemon juice and vinegar cook the eggs. Truly, this recipe was surprisingly easy, not very messy and pretty quick.

I even got to use my garlic mincer last night. The mincer may have been the kitchen accessory that spawned my interest in cooking. Before then I thought the only garlic available was in a powder or salt. What's not fun about squeezing the guts out of a pungent clove?

But when I got to the part of the recipe that said "1 1/2 cups olive oil," I balked. "WTF? We're in an economic crisis here, I am not pouring five dollars worth of oil into aioli." It turned out I didn't even have that much oil.

So I halved the recipe (the remainder of the oil is back in that bottle), and voila, still more aioli than I was able to use on the salmon. What I love about this as well is that there is so much room for improvisation on this recipe. I've seen aioli with all manner of herbs and spices. One of my favorite restaurants serves it with their sweet potato fries--a-maz-ing. The salmon recipe is a tweak from The French Market by Joanne Harris and Fran Ward--do yourself a favor and skip the braised puy lentil recipe--with aioli and leeks instead of straigh dijon mustard (leeks are a mild member of the onion family, no worries, that's a vegetable I've looked up before on Wikipedia).

Aioli: 4 cloves garlic, minced sea salt (or kosher) 2 egg yolks 3/4 teaspoon dijon mustard 2 teaspoons white wine vinegar (yeah, I used balsamic) 1 1/2 cup olive oil pepper Mince garlic cloves (or bash up with a pestel and mortar) and whisk with salt. Add egg yolks (if you save the whites you can make macaroons--I am kicking myself for letting them go down the drain), vinegar and dijon and whisk together until smooth. Slowly whisk in the oil. Add pepper and more salt to taste. Salmon with Aioli and Leeks: 2 salmon fillets 1 leek aioli olive oil salt and pepper Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place fillets on baking tray and sprinkle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Brush aioli generously onto the fillets. Dice leeks to make little disks (as seen in the photo above) and place on the fillets. Bake for 12 minutes or until the salmon is flaky.