PEEEENK

We must win for most fluorescent food made from natural ingredients. Come on! Look at that stuff!!

This is for Week 8 of the One Local Summer Challenge.

I didn't even know you could do that. But, yet, there it is. And just because we live a few miles from a nuclear power plant does not mean that we are experiencing an unnatural event. No. Our food was honestly pink. Wait - not pink. PEEEENK!

I bought this book called "Serving Up the Harvest" because it promised to give me new ideas on what to do with whatever happens to be in season at any particular time. Well, honey, it's beet season!

Tonight's dinner was a sandwich of minute steaks with sauteed onions and mushrooms and thinly sliced Swiss cheese accompanied by the pinkest salad in the world - Beet and New Potato Salad. Here's the recipe for the salad (with my modifications, of course):

Beet and New Potato Salad
12 small beets (about 2 pounds), tops and roots trimmed to 1 inch
1 1/2 pounds new potatoes, scrubbed and quartered if large
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. champagne vinegar
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3/4 cup sour cream
1 tbsp. chopped fresh dill
3 scallions, chopped
1 1/2 tsp. prepared horseradish
1 hard-cooked egg, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 400ºF.
2. Wash the beets, but do not peel. Divide among three large sheets of aluminum foil. Wrap to form well-sealed packets. Roast for 60 minutes, until the largest beet is easily pierced with a fork. Remove from the oven, open the packets and let cool.
3. Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in salted water to cover in a medium saucepan until just tender, about 20 minutes. Drain well and transfer to a large bowl. Add the oil and vinegar. Toss to mix. Season to taste with the salt and pepper and set aside.
4. When the beets are cool enough to handle, slip off the skin and cut into wedges to match the size of the potato pieces. Add to the potatoes.
5. Mix together the sour cream, dill, scallions, and horseradish. Add to the potatoes and beets and toss to mix. Taste and adjust the seasonings. The salad should sit for at least 30 minutes before serving. If you like, you can hold it in the refrigerator for up to 1 day (which is what we did).
6. Before serving, garnish with the chopped egg.

FYI - the cookbook describes this salad as: "Neon, lurid, garish - it's hard to find an exact description for this dazzlingly bright, magenta-colored salad of beets and potatoes, garnished with chopped hard-cooked eggs." They should have just said that it's PEEEENK!

For the sandwiches, Buzz cooked up the minute steaks on a griddle while sautéing the onions and mushrooms in a separate pan. When the steaks were done, he piled them up with the onions and mushrooms and covered with slices of the Swiss cheese. This was all placed on these wonderful steamed English table rolls, and then grilled on our panini griller. Yum!

This was an excellent summer meal!

Here's where EVERYTHING came from:

Beets - Jack's Farm (13.8 miles)
Potatoes - our garden (0 miles)
Sour cream - Natural by Nature (approx. 40 miles)
Dill - our garden (0 miles)
Scallions - our garden (0 miles)
Horseradish - Wills Valley (approx. 60 miles)
Egg - Mountain View Poultry (55.9 miles)
Minute steaks - Forks Farm (130 miles)
Mushrooms - Mother Earth Organics (37.3 miles)
Onion - our garden (0 miles)
Rolls - Metropolitan Bakery (approx. 30 miles)
Swiss cheese - Mountain Meadows (approx. 130 miles)

Not local: oil, vinegar, salt and pepper.

P.S. I can easily get beef from more local places but the representatives from Forks Farm were at our farmer's market and I had no idea they had come from 130 miles away. Wow!