Beet & Goat Cheese Salad
Beet & Goat Cheese Salad is our favorite salad. It is a recipe which we repeat almost weekly throughout the year. We particularly love Beet & Goat Cheese Salad in the winter months, when colors are more muted and eating tends towards the creamy and starchy.
Yield: Serves 4 as a side salad
Ingredients:
- 1 pound beets, unpeeled
- 1 large shallot, peeled, thinly sliced (can substitute red onion)
- 1/4 cup fresh goat cheese, crumbled into small chunks
- fresh dill (for garnish)
- pea sprouts (for garnish)
Vinaigrette:
- 4 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 1/2 teaspoons honey
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
- 1-2 garlic clove, crushed
Steps:
- Place the unpeeled beets in a medium pot, and cover completely with water. Bring to a boil and cook on medium, uncovered for 10-20 minutes, until the beets are tender when pierced with a knife.
- For the vinaigrette (while beets are cooking): In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, oil, honey, salt, pepper and garlic until smooth. Drop the sliced shallots into the vinaigrette to give them a quick pickling and to mellow the flavor.
- Once the beets are cooked through, drain the water and run cold water over the beets to cool. When the beets are cool enough to handle, peel the beets with your hands by rubbing the skin off, they should slip off easily without a knife or peeler. Disposable plastic gloves are useful here if you want to avoid staining your hands beet red!
- Cut the beets into wedges and drop into the vinaigrette. Stir to coat the beets with vinaigrette.
- Serve the beets warm or chilled on a bed of pea sprouts, garnished with quick pickled shallots, fresh dill, and goat cheese. Spoon over the remaining vinaigrette.
- This salad refrigerates well for 4 days.
Carrot Ribbon Salad with Carrot Top Pesto
Our friends Beth and Justin, both creative cooks and passionate gardeners, made our day when they dropped off some beautiful carrots, freshly dug from their garden. While hardcore carnivores may lay claim to nose-to-tail cooking, we think that this veggie based dish gives the concept a run for its money, as it uses all parts of the carrot plant: root-to-leaf cooking in its colorful prime. Carrot Ribbon Salad with Carrot Top Pesto is adapted from vegetable whiz Diane Morgan’s Roots cookbook. In this dish, the carrots are first mellowed with a quick hot water bath to soften their texture and bite. Carrot top pesto, with its subtle parsley-like flavor, is a lovely match, accented with dollops of creamy goat cheese. Find a source for fresh vibrant carrots with tops and make this beautiful dish.
Potato & Garlic Goat Cheese Gratin
When Paul asked what I wanted for my birthday meal this week, I immediately blurted out 'lots of potatoes!' Paul smirked, ok, so nothing new here. Upon further consideration, I requested a potato dish that was both creamy and crispy, pungent with garlic and goat cheese. This aromatic Potato Goat Cheese Gratin was the magnificent result, which I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This recipe is adapted from one of our favorite cookbook authors, James Peterson. It forgoes a bechamel or cream sauce since the high starch content of the potatoes eliminates the need for additional thickeners. For a crisp fall day, nothing beats the smell of slow roasting garlic, goat cheese, and potatoes!
Slow Cooker Lentil Salad with Roasted Squash
Research shows that taste and smell work together to help guide our perception of the flavor of food. Food without scent, is a large part of why I find the flu season so gastronomically depressing. Anytime you need to blow your nose to taste your steak, you know things are getting desperate. In this light, the old school slow cooker becomes a brilliant device: an aromatizer and purveyor of olfactory delight. Because who doesn't love the smell of cooking food when you come home from work starving? This fall, I found a clever slow cooker technique for French lentil salad. Our Slow Cooker Lentil Salad with Roasted Squash has a traditional French Dijon style vinaigrette, is garnished with a flurry of cheese, herbs and nuts, and with a nod towards fall, accompanied by caramelized roasted Delicata Squash. Do not hesitate to use bold flavors in this salad, a lentil under seasoned is a truly woeful thing.
Spinach, Strawberry, Avocado Salad with Goat Cheese & Pecans
Thanks for following along with our new adventures! We recently moved from Pittsburgh to Haiti where we are starting a 5 year volunteer assignment with a non-profit relief and development organization. We will be in transition for the next few months as we complete our in-country orientation, language study, spend time living with host families in both the countryside and capital... and lest we forget, have our first baby somewhere in there as well! Please bear with us as we will not have ready access to internet or a kitchen throughout this time. We will continue to share new recipes that we've prepared in advance, and updates on our new life in Haiti as often as we are able.
Even before I became pregnant, I was no stranger to food cravings, but looking back, pregnancy has taken me down some odd paths. There was the stage at the beginning, when in between bouts of vomiting, I madly craved salty, tangy and pickled foods. For a while I ate lentil salad with tangy vinaigrette and feta for breakfast every morning. Luckily, the intensity of my craving passed before I fully pickled our baby. In the second trimester, my cravings swung towards tex-mex, and sour-cream became the condiment of choice on everything. Mid pregnancy was notable for my lack of interest in dessert, with an occasional craving for canned peaches. Thankfully for my health, this third trimester has brought a renewed love of fresh fruits and veggies. So while I recognize that this Spinach, Strawberry & Avocado Salad is in no way seasonal, I have happily scarfed it for lunch and sometimes dinner for the month leading up to our departure to Haiti. I like the contrast of crisp spinach, sweet strawberries, creamy avocado nestled beside tangy goat cheese, toasted pecans, and topped with a balsamic vinaigrette.
Buckwheat Tabbouleh with Goat Cheese
Buckwheat Tabbouleh with Goat Cheese is a light and zippy salad, flush with fiber and herbs. It is quick and easy to make, healthy, filling, and is a great alternative to traditional Bulgar wheat tabbouleh if you're gluten-free. This salad allows the nutty flavor of buckwheat to come through. If you've never tried buckwheat groats before, this is a great place to start. A word about buckwheat grouts for those unfamiliar with this lovely little grain. Buckwheat is in fact not related to its' namesake, wheat, and comes from the triangular seed of an herb. Toasted buckwheat groats are called Kasha; Buckwheat grouts are the raw version. These little kernels taste nutty and have a firm texture when cooked, they stand up well to lemon vinaigrette and meld deliciously together for a final product that is refreshing and filling. This recipe is adapted from America's Test Kitchen's How Can it be Gluten Free Cookbook. We (but mostly me) at the Hungry Hounds are always searching for an opportunity to add goat cheese to dishes, and this was a perfect opportunity. The goat cheese stepped up the flavor contrast, added richness, and blended with the other ingredients to make for an earthy, herbaceous mouthful!
