"beet salad" news and stories

I've been meaning for a while to write about healthy alternatives to the usual summer barbecue foods. My family hosted a desserts-only BBQ for this weekend (which turned into burgers and dogs BBQ), and I feel like I've been doing the circuit of barbecues featuring heavy slaws, burgers with lots of toppings, and rich chocolate chip cookies. While I love these foods as much as anyone, I'm trying to put together a list of the best alternative recipes from across the web to replace these often less-healthy favorites. Here's what I have:

My all time favorite lemon coleslaw from Epicurious.

Citrus-spiked jicama and carrot slaw from Cooking Light.

Smitten Kitchen's black bean confetti salad.

Mark Bittman's Leek Salad on Bitten.

Raw beet salad from stonesoup.

Rhubarb soda from Culinate. Okay, not a healthy alternative, but beautiful nonetheless.

Charred corn salad from Williams Sonoma.

Feel free to add your favorite healthy summer salads and slaws, barbecued goodies and summer desserts!

When I was at the farmers market on Saturday with Sarah, I picked up a couple pounds of gorgeous-looking beets, without much of a plan other than they called out to me. Yesterday afternoon around 3 pm, they started to talk to me from the vegetable drawer and so I put a pot of water on the stove to boil them up. I had picked up a package of chevre at Trader Joe's and I started to imagine a beet and goat cheese salad with red onion, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

While I was in the middle of making some relatives showed up and my cooked beets spent about an hour gently cooling in their skins on the kitchen counter. When I finally got back to them, they slipped out of their skins easily. I cut them into half moons, tossed them with some great olive oil that somehow wandered into my parents' kitchen, the crumbled chevre, some slivered and soaked (in attempt to make them a little less pungent) red onion, a little balsamic, a bit of cracked black pepper and some salt.

I had intended to top it with some toasted walnuts, but people came in and started eating it before I got to that step. Instead I just cut off a hunk of sourdough from a loaf I bought at New Seasons earlier in the day and scooped up a plate of beet salad for myself. They were some of the best beets I'd ever had, sweet and earthy and so tender. If you have some beets laying around, this is a great way to make them appeal to a large swath of people, as no one who has passed through the house yet has been able to say no to it.

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