What to do with your farm-share veggies: Roasted beet salad

I’ve been thinking a lot about roots lately. How they are buried in the dark, below everything else, unseen and oft unappreciated. And yet roots are how we connect, to our strength, to the memories in our minds and in our veins, to the means of life.

Of all the things you can pull from the ground, beets hark back to my roots with an unmatched force. There is blood in there, a metallic sweetness, mixed with a darkness that is part safe earth and part haunting. These aren’t easy favors with the kind of light sweetness and airy crunch that is more common with early summer vegetables. And, yet, there in my farm-share bag every week are the beets, looking at me like some kind of overly serious kid sitting quietly in the back of class with a worn copy of Atlas Shrugged while the rest of the kids yammer on about the prom. What are beets doing in there with all the lightweights? Zucchini? Five minutes in a pan with olive oil, or one quick slice and slap it on the grill? Salad greens? Wash and toss…easy. Swiss chard? Dice, sauté and throw on some pasta. And so the week goes, until we are five or six days in, and the beets are left lonely at the bottom of the vegetable drawer. Deal with me, they seem to say.

OK, OK.

Beets have always seemed demanding to me. There is a pay off but it required deep commitment, time and heat. In the past, I’ve chunked and roasted them in the oven or boiled them like potatoes. My favorite beet recipe is borscht. But who wants to make soup or steam or waft in oven heat in July?

Well, last week after several days of procrastinating, I dug out the beets. Roasted, caramelized flavor is what I wanted, but without the meaty intensity of big pieces done in the oven.

I was also looking for anything that might make it seem like I wasn’t making salad greens for dinner, yet again. My kids and meat loving husband are open-minded folks, but this time of year salad greens dominate every menu.

I had a sudden flash of some long ago salad bar that had little cubed beets in a back tin somewhere. I used to love those, even if they did taste like a can. OK. OK.

I peeled the beets and cut them into small cubes, just slightly smaller than a playing dice. Tossed them with a good douse of olive oil, coarse salt, pepper, and some thyme. Then I laid them out in one layer on a tin-foiled sheet and stuck them into the toaster oven at 450 degrees.

After about 10 minutes, I jiggled them a bit and put them back in. They were done by the time I had boiled a pot of water and cooked a pound of pasta. Onto the top of the salad they went with some crumbled goat cheese. The roasting intensified the beets’ sweet dankness, but in small bites mixed in with greens and a lemony dressing it was pure summer, but a summer with memories, and an earthy depth, and roots.