The Sacred Art of Eating

For the third week running we visited the newly re-launched Leith’s Village Store on Saturday. In fact, last weekend we were there as volunteers, selling locally grown potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, peas, rocket, chard, lettuce, radishes, courgettes to the people of Leith. Each week there are more customers and therefore more stock for the following week. When we were selling we ran out of eggs (twice! We even sourced an extra dozen but they went in a flash) and so this week they had stacks of the things!

We also had the task last week of securing this beautiful hand-painted sign. It’s on paper (?lining paper) with strings through reinforced corners….but there’s nothing really at the Drill Hall to attach it to, so we had to use a lot of parcel tape to stick the strings to the stone….and hope….

Despite being a very blustery day it survived, yay!

Back to this week. I was pleased to see, for the first time, bunches of very fresh looking beetroot. (Frustrating that I was thwarted in my attempts to buy beetroot last week, but such is the nature of things). We also got some local grown rocket- 40g to be precise, how nice to be able to grab it by the handful and take as much or as little as you need! – as well as courgettes, broccoli and chestnut mushrooms.

On Saturday night we decided to roast the beetroot to have with pasta. I cast about on the internet for timings and came across this delightful VideoJug vid on how to cook beetroot. We didn’t have any thyme but basically followed their instructions. (I was also on the hunt for an Ottolenghi recipe for beetroot with maple syrup and sherry vinegar without success…found sweet potato though, will have to assume is the same!)

So. Step one, prep the beetroot.

Um…what?

I’ve seen stripey beetroot before. Looks dead exciting raw but if you cook it with regular beetroot it gets dyed and the effect is lost. I’ve seen golden beetroot before (although now I think about it I’m not sure what colour its skin is. Brown?) But white ?

It should be noted that externally, all these beets looked exactly the same. Very pink, compared with most beetroot I’ve seen, but nevertheless kinda normal. The first one I sliced into was tiny, about the size of a cherry tomato, and when I saw the white inner I thought “b***er, I’ve bought blimen’ radishes!’. But they smelled of beetroot. And when I hit a striped one I was more reassured. So we ploughed on regardless.

We roasted them in the oven glazed in, essentially, salad dressing. The smell that wafted through when D checked the oven at half time was glorious. Served over a bed of buttery spaghetti and some of the rocket, it all tasted fantastic.

Visually, we’d have been better with normal, red, beetroot. It looked a bit like roasted garlic or perhaps parsnip. Not the glorious contrasting colours I’d originally envisaged. Had it not been for the rocket this would have been close to a one-colour-meal. But it was just the two of us and it tasted great. And now I know; beetroot can be pink on the outside, white on the inside. And I wonder….is it really normal to be red, or have I simply been brainwashed by the supermarkets and the force of consumer expectation? Ach, it’s always been red when I’ve seen Ken dig it up out of the garden!

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