The idea for this salad came from my niece Cameron. She and her two sisters: Caroline and Courteney recently came out to California. They are some of the funniest people I know. Anyway Here's what you'll need for Cameron's salad.
A cup of beets (Trader Joe's and Ralphs/Kroger has them in a pkg. If you can't find this type you can use canned whole or sliced beets)
1 cup of butternut squash. (Again Trader Joe's and Ralphs/Kroger has them already in chunks) Don't get the frozen kind. (Soggy city) Cameron started with an actual butternut squash and roasted the seeds. Hats off to her.
2 bags of Spinach or Arugula (Cameron swears by arugula.)
1/2 a cup of crumbled goat cheese
(Opt.) Walnuts or any other kind of nuts or seeds.
Step 1. Preheat oven to 475. Take the beets and cut them into bite sized pieces, put them on a sprayed cookie sheet and stick them in the oven on the lower rack.
Step 2. Next cut the butternut squash into small chunks, put those on a sprayed cookie sheet and pop them in the upper rack for 25 min. Remove squash from oven. (You want the pieces to be soft but not mushy.) Let the beets continue to cook until they are shriveled up.
Let the vegetables cool then toss them with lettuce, goat cheese and a simple dressing like balsamic. (There is a great balsamic dressing recipe in the blog post called "Sweet and Blue". Just go to the top of this page and push Appetizers/Salads.)
Parsnips?
Another thing you can do with Beets and Butternut Squash is roast them with other vegetables like parsnips, red onion, and carrots. Try rainbow (multi-colored) carrots they look awesome. Follow the steps above and simply add the other vegetables to the butternut squash. I recently served this to Richard and Sue Davis from Switzerland and they raved!
Cooking Tidbit: What the heck are parsnips? They look like albino carrots and they have a sweeter taste. Sue says that Americans are clueless about them, but for the British they are a staple.
Abraquadabra
I was over at Michael and Marcy Tillman's in Laguna Beach. I remarked at how beautiful their garden was. Right there and then Michael cut me some stems way down at the base and told me to just stick them in the ground at my house and watch them grow. The one that took was the Chocolate Geranium. I was amazed! It was like magic!
Recently I talked to Dale Ghere also of Laguna Beach. He said the thing that would help the process would be to plant the stems in pots, then water them daily for a while. He also said that you could do this with succulents, and once the succulents take he only waters them when he feels like it.
