Every now and again, we try to make a dish that we’ve never heard of, much less tried before. So, here we go on Blood Orange, Beet, and Fennel Salad. No…. its not really a sexy name, but click through on that link and look at that photo! I mean, wow!
So, when we found out that our local gourmet grocery chain was having a sale on blood oranges (not something we usually see), we decided to give this one a whirl.
We haven’t even touched these ingredients yet and they already look pretty exotic. Funky fennel, two types of beets, lots of citrus. Good Stuff.
We’ve never cooked with beets. We’ve rarely EATEN beets. The recipe called for us to trim them down, wrap them in foil, and roast them at 400 degrees for an hour.
After roasting, the skins slide right off… then they get all sliced and diced.
The recipe called for blood oranges, which have a great dark red color, plus one naval orange. Here we cut away all the rind and the pith. How pithy they were.
Then we used a technique called “supreming.” Luckily I had learned how to do this at a knife skills cooking class. It basically involves cutting the meat of the orange segments away from the skins.
The oranges that didn’t get supremed just got sliced. How can you resist those colors!
Next we trimmed and mandolined the fennel and red onion into thin slices. Fennel has a licorice–like flavor, but is also similar to a mild onion.
After carefully, and decoratively stacking all of the stuff we sliced up, we took the citrus juice from the bowl and added olive oil, salt, and pepper to make a really great vinaigrette that got drizzled all over the plate. Then cilantro to garnish.
The flavor of the oranges and the onion and fennel were great. The beets…I thought would be sweet… but after roasting, they were actually kind of bitter. I’m the only one who seemed to complain about them though, but maybe that’s because….
…they stained my hand red for a day! I looked like I’d voted multiple times in an Iraqi election!
No comments:
Post a Comment