Beetroot, Orange and Walnut Salad

[watervole]

My husband has always been a good cook - his mother taught him, and she had a real knack for tasty meals that didn't take forever to make or need exotic ingredients.  (She was a domestic science teacher for part of her life - I suspect her pupils were very lucky students)

This last year, he's been focusing on vegan recipes, and some of them are absolutely delicious.

Here's one of my favourites.  It should be eaten as a main meal.  The quantities aren't included, because they don't need to be exact, and you can tweak as you like.

 

It also has the added bonus of looking very pretty on the plate, with the dark purple beetroot and the orange segments, with the walnuts scattered around.

 

Beetroot, Orange and Walnut Salad

 

Ingredients:

 

Beetroot (in slices)

Oranges (1 per person)

Walnuts

Balsamic Vinegar

Olive oil

 

Method:

 

Par boil the beetroot, while peeling and chopping oranges

 

On plate lay out beetroot slices, the orange pieces, walnuts

 

Drizzle with the dressing (the balsamic vinegar mixed with the olive oil)

 

serve with potatoes (or bread, or quinoa, or carbohydrate of your choice)

 

If available some green salad would be an appropriate addition.

 

Comments

[maia]

Oh, this sounds delicious! Thank you, watervole!

[igenlode]

I have beetroots and oranges, but no walnuts (which I suspect are the vital ingredient) or 'balsamic' vinegar. I'm not sure pumpkin seeds would have the requisite effect...

[watervole]

Any pecan nuts?

Wine vinegar?

[igenlode]

Whole almonds, and malt vinegar for cleaning purposes.

[igenlode]

I did make a very tasty 'smoky' salad from grated swede and cabbage with chopped dates, toasted sunflower seeds, and grilled olives... and, not being a vegan, supplied the protein content with my leek and bacon quiche :-)

[watervole]

You already had protein with the sunflower seeds :)

[igenlode]

A much smaller volume overall than walnuts would have been -- I don't know how the actual protein content compares between seeds and nuts.

[watervole]

Protein content varies a lot between different seeds and nuts. They'll all good, but some probably better than others.

But then some are good for minerals, etc.

[igenlode]

I got a pound of fresh walnuts from the market and was able to try this out, but it didn't seem very interesting. I cheered it up a bit by adding seasoning (not mentioned in the original recipe) and some chopped chives and mint from my plant-pots to compensate for the lack of balsamic in the vinegar, but I think I preferred my swede and date salad -- which certainly felt more substantial, even without the added couscous accompaniment!
Maybe I got the proportions wrong.

[watervole]

It can be hard to tell what the magic combination in a recipe is.

Maybe it was the beetroot/balsamic vinegar part?

[igenlode]

They may not have been very good walnuts -- or I just don't like walnuts in food very much. I bought a whole pound of nuts in the shell, and I've been experimenting with various other recipes that use them, such as Georgian bean salad https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/222572/georgian-bean-salad/ and pasta tossed in melted butter and chopped walnuts, and I haven't got on with any of them. The nicest thing to do is simply to crack the shells with the haft of a knife and eat the nuts as a snack...

I might try one more recipe, which is a squash risotto with toasted walnuts; toasting them should intensify the flavour.

[watervole]

I find walnuts get a bit of an off taste if they get old. I've never noticed it much with other nuts.

They're probably my least favourite nut, but there are some things I like them in.

I'll be interested to hear how roasting them works.

[igenlode]

It made the risotto more interesting -- the most interesting part, to be honest. I've had better pumpkin/squash risotto recipes; this one tried to be very fancy by pre-cooking half the squash in water to form a puree and frying the other half to caramelise it, then just adding it a few minutes before the rice was cooked. It works much better when you actually cook the squash in with the rice (I even used the drained-off cooking water in with the rabbit stock, but it didn't have the same effect).

Toasted walnuts are nice, though. Apparently the Americans sugar-glaze them ('candied walnuts') before adding them to risotto, but then Americans seem to use bizarrely large quantities of sugar in everything.

Facebook has been showing me American dessert recipes, and when you convert the quantities from the relatively small-sounding 'cups', because sugar is so heavy relative to its volume you realise you're being asked to make a pie filling with something like eight ounces of sugar in it... "Chocolate cobbler" sounded appealing, until I looked at the quantities and realised it wasn't just 5oz sugar in the main mixture, but another 7oz sugar in the topping -- a couple of weeks' worth of sugar in a single dessert! And even "Water pie", supposedly a super-economical recipe from the Great Depression, involves 5 tablespoons of butter and 7oz sugar in addition to all the ingredients required for a large pie-crust -- a very big change from the English economy recipes I've been baking that rely on beetroot to save on sugar and potatoes to save on fat and flour. The chocolate pudding from a few days ago had one ounce of fat and one and a half ounces of sugar to eight ounces of grated vegetables and six ounces of flour... and was still very moist and tasty after being steamed for a couple of hours. I'm pretty sure I've got a 'self-saucing' pudding in the National Trust cookbook that is similar to the 'cobbler', because I remember accidentally putting twice too much water in it and still getting successful results -- and I'm pretty sure the proportions are nothing like the US ones!

[watervole]

We often cook stuff in with rice. Fried or grilled squash definitely gives it a nice flavour.

Sugar... Apart from making jam, we hardly use any at all.

What some people use is absolutely crazy! No wonder diabetes is so widespead.

'Cobbler'to us means a slightly dry dumpling mix spread used on top of a casserole a bit like a very thick pie crust.

[igenlode]

I make all my own cakes and puddings, and eat dessert with every meal, so I'm constantly watching my sugar supplies go down -- apart from anything else, rhubarb and cooking apples are really inedible without it, and there is precious little other fruit at this time of year. Given that I'm now under eight stone, diabetes is the least of my concerns... the overweight people who are constantly eschewing sugar in their tea and avoiding the pudding course like the plague don't seem to benefit much from the practice, other than a general expression of martyrdom.

I did wonder if traditional American cuisine might explain the traditional American waistline, but then to be fair the diet of the English working class at that same era consisted of a high proportion of bread-and-jam -- nobody got fat on it, even if they mostly lost teeth. More a matter of modern physical inactivity, I think.

I put the last of the walnuts into some orange nut teabread , a recipe I've used before from an old newspaper clipping -- the last time I made it I didn't have any nuts, and they definitely make a significant improvement. And you get 12-16 slices out of 2 ounces of butter and 3 ounces of sugar (plus an extra spoonful boiled in juice for the glaze on the top; it's worth doing for the effect of the concentrated sweetness and crunchy texture).

'Cobbler' to us means a slightly dry dumpling mix spread used on top of a casserole a bit like a very thick pie crust.

I've always known a 'cobbler' as a series of overlapping scone rounds used in lieu of a pastry topping, which I think is effectively the same thing.
Perhaps I should make a butternut squash cobbler out of the other half of my squash, which has developed a squishy spot where the rock-hard skin has evidently been damaged at some point...