Recipe by Isaac and Heydon

Hi friends! We are hunkered down in quarantine and cooking more than ever. Thankfully, we have a wizard in the kitchen at this humble abode, so I can (very gratefully) busy myself with eating said wizard’s creations and then write about his fruitful culinary escapades sated on the couch, a welcome distraction. This easy salad utilized a ton of the CSA veggies and also brought some much needed colorful nutrition to our diet that has been consisting of mostly beige: think pasta bakes, meaty tacos, you know the drill… savory and so, so delicious, but lacking in vibrant veggies. This was and felt like a salubrious elixir. I even drank some of the remaining beet juice that had pooled at the bottom of the bowl when I finished noshing. Yum.

Ingredients

• 2 chioggia beets
• 3 red beets
• ⅔ bunch of curly kale
• 1 large green onion
• 1 lemon
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Claussen pickle juice or some sort of quick pickle brine

Peel chioggia beets, and cut into paper thin slices. Put them into a cup full of Claussen pickle juice to soak and *quick pickle* while preparing the rest of the salad.

Get a pot of salted boiling water going. Cut the tops off the red beets (and save for a later saute). Once the water is boiling, throw the topless red beets in, and turn the water to low heat. Put a lid on the pot and let simmer for an hour. Check tenderness with a fork. If they are ready, they should be very easily pierced. Put the finished beets in an ice bath. After they are cooled, peel, cut in half, and slice thinly. Put them in a bowl with a third of a cup of olive oil and about 10 grinds of salt. Stir thoroughly. Set in the fridge to marinate.

Trim the stalks off of the kale, and chop coarsely to prepare for the blanching process. Put greens in the pot that you boiled the beets in, as the water should still be hot enough to blanch. Let soak for about a minute, and put into an ice bath. Shake the excess water off the kale and put into a bowl.

Chop a green onion thinly and combine with kale. Add the red beets and the olive oil soak into the mixture as well. Cut a lemon in half and squeeze juice into the bowl and stir. Additionally, grind about 10 grinds of salt, another drizzle of olive oil, and toss.

Serve the salad and garnish top with the stunning quick pickled chioggia beets. Enjoy. Sending love from our home to yours.