Beetroot is a root vegetable that offers very good nutrition.
It is full of antioxidants, flavonoids, methionine and hyaluronic acid, and in addition, it is also fiber rich.
What about sugar? The starch in the root vegetable causes it to get up to 12g of sugar per 100 grams of food, so it may not be something to revel in for both breakfast lunch and dinner every day of the week, but it can probably act as subcomponent of a dinner once in a while – IF it doesn’t trigger you
It is said that it does a lot of good by being able to:
- Lowering high blood pressure
- Help the liver, bowel and skin in the detoxification process
- Give good food to your gut bacteria
- Help base the body
We have been growing beetroot in the garden this year and when I saw so clearly how much of the plant ends up above ground, I thought about what to do with that part instead of just throwing it away. Given sustainability, it’s a shame to let it go to the dump. Imagine my surprise when I read that the blast is a bit like Mangold and great to use in cooking.
With that knowledge, I put together a dinner focusing on using the whole beetroot and ended up making pesto off the blast and oven-gratining the beetroot with chevre cheese.
The pesto I then used, both for marinating chicken, and eating with the beets, chicken and some grilled vegetables.
That was Yummy.
Beetroot leaf Pesto: About 4-5 dl when ready
- Blast from 5 freshly harvested beetroots
- 200g feta cheese
- 1/2 pot basil
- 1-2 garlic cloves
- Salt and pepper
- Olive oil
Here’s how:
- Cut the leaves of the beetroots and gather them. Now they’re going to be blanched before we do more with them.
- Pour water into the bottom of a large casserole and bring it to boil
- At the same time, bring about 1.5 litres of water to boil in a kettle or smaller casserole.
- When the water boils in both pots, take the large casserole of the heat, put all the beetroot leaves in the large casserole and pour the boiling water from the smaller pot/kettle over. Set back on the heat and let boil for a maximum of one minute.
- Pour the boiling water off and rinse the leaves in cold water until cooled.
- Squeeze out the water. Red color leaves with the water, not to be surprised by that.
- Now put the squeezed leaves in a food processor and add the other dry ingredients.
- Mix, salt and pepper and stir in the olive oil to the desired consistency. Some prefer pesto almost runny while others want it reasonably firm. How do you want it?
The pesto can now be used straight off as an sidedish. You can keep it in the fridge for about a week.
Pestomarinated chicken
If you want to make chicken like I did that night, you simply take the pesto and rub around the chicken pieces. For this dinner i used chicken thigh file.
Leave to marinate for a while, then place on the grill.
Oven-grated beetroot
For oven-grated beetroot, take the following ingredients
- 5 beetroots (the ones where you used the blast for the pesto)
- 200g chevre cheese
- Olive oil to drizzle over
- Salt
- Try even dry-roasted pine nuts or sunflower seeds, if that doesn’t trigger you
Here’s how:
- Start by rinsing the beetroot and cutting away the blast and root thread
- Cook for 15 – 20 minutes in lightly salted water (time depending on the size of the beets) – they should not be cooked through and are fine to use even with hard core.
- After boiling – Rinse under cold water, now the outer shell is easy to remove if it is a freshly harvested primer. Otherwise, you’ll have to peel with a knife.
- Now preheat the oven to about 200 degrees celsius hot air
- Divide each beetroot into 4 slices/boats and place in an ovenproof dish.
- Distribute the chevre cheese over
- Salt and olive oil
- Leave to gratinate in the oven for about 15 minutes
- Spread the dry-roasted seeds/nuts on it and serve
If you have room for vegetables on the grill, you can add that too, or you can create a tasty salad
wishing you a tasty meal (and that is not beer in the picture) – instead, it’s an olive oil directly imported from Kos last summer – this i used to drizzle over my plate 🙂
