I invented Beetpocalypse Pasta over the summer, but I think it’ll be an even better dish in the fall. Warm, earthy, and colorful, Beetpocalypse Pasta is the cure for what ails you.
Beetpocalypse Pasta originated when I picked up a lovely bunch of beets from my local Safeway for two bucks. I’d always liked beets, but I’d never tried roasting them myself. I also interested in the greens attached to these lovely beets. I knew beet greens were edible, but I’d never cooked with them before. Given my inordinate fondness for leafy greens, I figured I’d saute them one night with a little garlic and that would be fine.
When it came time to separate the tubers from the greens, though, I got to thinking. What if I obliterated the beets entirely in one go? What if I brought about… a beetpocalypse?
I decided to roast the beets, cut them up, and then saute them along with the beet greens. But then I started over-advertising my brilliant beetpocalypse. Too many friends showed up to dinner, and there wasn’t going to be enough beets and greens to go around.
So then I turned it into a pasta dish. And everyone loved it. Including the carnivores and the beet doubtfuls. Without further ado, I give you the recipe.
The beetpocalypse has begun.
Beetpocalypse Pasta
Tools
a knife
a cutting board
a pot
a large saucepan
Ingredients
one bunch beets, with greens attached
whole wheat pasta (any shape you want)
soft goat cheese, such as chevre
olive oil
garlic
black and/or red pepper
salt
1) Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2) While the oven heats, remove the greens from the beets and set aside. Rinse and dry the beets. Remember that even the raw beet juice can stain! Pierce the beets several times with a fork or knife and then wrap them in aluminum foil. When the oven is hot, place the beets on the middle rack. Roast them for an hour.
3) While the beets are roasting, you can do the rest of your prep work. Rinse the greens and slice them into ribbons. Mince a few cloves of garlic. This chopping probably won’t take you a full hour, so go read a book or something in the meantime.
4) When the beets are done, remove them from the oven and wait until they are cool enough to handle. Then peel the beets with your hands, preferably over the sink. The skins should slide right off. Remember, beets stain, so keep them away from your favorite t-shirt. Your hands will probably turn atomic pink. This is totally normal. Chop the peeled beets into large chunks and set them aside.
My friend L. Her hands are stained from the beet massacre.
5) Fill your pot with water, lightly salt it, and bring it to a boil. Cook the pasta according the the package instructions.
6) While the pasta’s cooking, heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in the pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and stir until golden and fragrant. Add the greens and saute until wilted. Add the chopped beets and heat through.
7) By now your pasta should be done. Drain it in the sink, but reserve a half cup or so of pasta water. The starch in the pasta water helps to form a basic pan sauce.
8 ) Ideally, you should be able to pour the pasta and pasta water into the pan and mix it all up. If your pan is too small, perform this step in the pot. Combine all of the ingredients and add salt and pepper to taste. The pasta, much like your hands, will turn atomic pink. Don’t panic.
The end times are delicious.
9) Scoop the pasta onto plates and serve topped with crumbled goat cheese. The cheese will slightly melt on the hot pasta and enhance the pan sauce. Vegans can just avoid the cheese. It’s still good without it.
True, I haven’t updated poor Knives Out in a few months. But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about it.
After a hiatus as I moved and adjusted to a new apartment and a new semester, I’m back in cooking mode. I’m working on my thesis, but cooking is an excellent form of stress relief.
I’ll also try to post backlogged recipes for things like Mushroom Stroganoff, Beetpocalypse Pasta, and more. Most of these dishes are more appropriate for the fall months anyway.
Sometimes, though, lunch is less about cooking and more about finding something nutritious to stick in your mouth. After vacationing in Seattle and eating an inordinate amount of fried seafood, I find myself in a food mood of accidental veganism. I’ll prepare meals, eat them, and only afterward notice that they lacked any kind of animal products. I’ve been craving plants and whole grains.
The following isn’t a recipe so much as a template. You can stick pretty much anything in here and have a decent, hyper-nutritious snack or lunch in about five minutes. Nice for when you have to run to class.
A green pick-me-up.
Quick Veggie Fold-Up
Tools
your hands
a knife for spreading things
probably a plate
Ingredients
a whole wheat tortilla or wrap
any flavor hummus you like (I used roasted garlic)
raw veggies like baby greens, sprouts, and red peppers
1) Lay your tortilla flat and spread it with a good thick layer of hummus.
2) Layer as many vegetables on top of it as you like.
3) Fold it in half and chow down. I find these babies tend to be too full of stuff to actually roll up, so it’s a fold-up as opposed to a wrap.
Variations
Substitute cream cheese or mashed avocado for the hummus.
Try it with nut butter and fruit.
Or soft goat cheese with ripe pear or berries.
Fried avocado taco for the win.
Things have been a little quiet on Knives Out recently, as I’ve been out of town the last two weekends. I just back back to Portland after visiting relatives in Austin, TX.
Portland’s a great town for chowing down, but it’s noticeably lacking in a few departments. I could write an entire post about the lack of decent Chinese food in Portland. (Except for the venerable Wong’s King Seafood, of course.) The other disappointment is the paucity of really good Mexican food.
So I spent a lot of time in Austin eating anything I could that came with fresh tortilla chips. Cheese sauce normally squicks me out, but I had some queso dip that was one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten in recent memory. Other highlights included dry, on-the-rocks margaritas made with fresh lime juice and fried avocado tacos. Fried. Avocado. Tacos. I discovered that avocados, when fried, develop a warm, molten consistency that goes amazingly well with cool shredded lettuce and chipotle salsa. I will miss that food.
There aren’t many things in this world better than fresh corn tortillas. I might try to make some myself. I’ll let you know how they turn out.
I also, bizarrely enough, got to eat some really good New Haven style pizza while I was there. It had that thin, perfectly charred crust that I haven’t gotten to eat since I lived in Connecticut. Why is there New Haven style pizza in Austin? Because the daughter of the owners of my favorite pizza parlors in CT, Harry’s Pizza, decided to set up shop in Austin. Her place is called Salvation Pizza, and I highly recommend it.
What sorts of regional foods do you look out for when you’re traveling that you can’t find at home? Or what kinds of food do you get homesick for when you’re on the road?
And do you have any recommendations for better-than-average Mexican food in Portland, OR?
I’ve got a couple of recipes backlogged on my computer right now, so I’ll try to post one or two this week to make up for my recent lack of attention. Look out for Flatbread Pizza and Beetpocalypse Pasta, coming soon to a Knives Out near you.
It's really impossible to mess this up.
This summer has been an unusually hot one for Portland. While I love the enormous gas stove in the kitchen, I don’t love the fact that it heats up our entire kitchen and living room area. While foolishly making a mushroom stroganoff the other day (recipe to come later), I felt that I was now able to intimately understand the term “slaving over a hot stove”. Cooking never felt so much like a chore to me.
My housemates and I plan out communal dinners most days of the week. We decided we needed to have at least one no-cook meal this week to get a little relief from the heat.
You can’t go wrong with bread, fruit, and cheese.
So my housemates and I decided to have a bread, fruit, and cheese night. K. baked two loaves of french bread, L. bought a wedge of brie from Trader Joe’s and a quart of raspberries from the fruit stand, and I bought the rest of the fruit. Then we went to town on them. Served alongside cold glasses of ice water, the dinner was a perfect combination of creamy cheese satisfaction and refreshing fruit.
I recommend buying the highest quality fruit and cheese you can afford for this dinner, as they’re really the star of the plate. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations of fruit and cheese. Tart apples and sharp cheddar is a classic. Blue cheeses go wonderfully with fresh or dried figs and a drizzle of honey. The creamy mildness of brie is a nice contrast to tangy, brightly colored berries. While K. spoils me with homemade baked goods, I think this would still be delicious with store-bought french bread. This dinner was a little more expensive than making a cooked dinner from scratch, but it was worth it to keep the kitchen cool. Besides the plus of no skillets or pans to clean, we had lots of leftover brie for future ham-and-cheese sandwiches.
For a tasty (and somewhat cheaper and healthier) alternative, substitute the cheese for ripe a avocado sprinkled with a pinch of coarse kosher salt.
The other night my housemate L. made a delicious soup. It smelled so good that I ended up being a backseat cook, hovering around the stove and taking pictures and notes in order to recreate it in the future.
The version she made used real crab, but she says that it’s equally good with the much cheaper “crab” sticks that you often see in California rolls. We left out the cooking wine because we didn’t feel like buying a whole bottle for a single recipe. It still tasted great, though.
Ginger + crab = awesome.
Ginger Crab Soup
Tools
medium pot
stirring implement (wood spoons are always good)
decent chef’s knife or paring knife
cutting board
Ingredients
½ lb. crab meat, fresh or canned
4 slices ginger (root)
2 tomatoes, cut into 8 sections
2 tbsp vegetable oil
4 cups chicken broth
2 eggs
2 tbsp Sauterne wine
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp vinegar
2 scallions, finely chopped
black pepper to taste
1) Slice up the ginger and tomatoes, followed by the scallions. Keep them somewhat separate from each other.
2) Heat the oil in the pot over medium heat. Add the ginger and saute until fragrant.
3) Add the tomatoes and the crab and saute for another 5 minutes. It should start smelling nice and crabby.
4) Add the chicken broth. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for six minutes.
5) Meanwhile, beat the eggs. I recommend using a small bowl and the tines of a fork for this. Mix the wine, soy sauce, vinegar, scallions, and pepper into the beaten eggs.
6) After the soup has simmered for six minutes, pour in the egg mixture. To produce an egg drop effect, let the egg cook in the broth for about 30 seconds, or until it starts to turn opaque, before stirring it. Simmer for another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
7) Serve hot and enjoy. Top with more chopped scallions and black pepper if you wish. The soup is gingery but mild, so add a few splashes of Sriracha if you want to up the heat factor.
I eat a lot of greens. A lot of greens. So many greens that one of my housemates jokes that they’re one of my personal major food groups. I don’t deny it. There’s a lot to love about greens. Chard, kale, and collards usually run from about $1.50 to $2 a bunch at my local Safeway. Besides being incredibly cheap, greens are nutritional powerhouses and great sources of of vegetarian calcium and iron. And, of course, they can be quite tasty.
I eat a lot of beans for the same reason. Cheap, delicious, and nutritious. So when I saw this recipe on Cheap Healthy Good Monday morning, I knew I had to try it. They used escarole, but I decided to substitute the pile of red chard I had sitting in my fridge. This is an easy, one-dish weeknight meal. The main ingredients cost only a couple of dollars and the end result is quite good for you. It would make a tasty side dish or a meal in itself. This is a vegan dish when prepared as is, but I’ve included a meatier variation at the end of the recipe.
Mmm, beans and greens. I used red chard and navy beans.
Easy Beans and Greens
adapted from Cheap Healthy Good’s “Escarole and White Beans”
Serves two as a main dish or three to four as a side dish.
Tools
a large pan
a stirring implement
a cutting board
a good all-purpose knife, like a chef’s knife
colander (optional)
Ingredients
one bunch greens of choice (escarole, kale, chard, or mustard greens are good choices)
one can of white (navy) beans, undrained
two tablespoons olive oil
two (or more) cloves of garlic
salt and pepper
smoked paprika (optional)
1) Slice greens into ribbons. To make slicing the greens easier, try stacking a few together and rolling them into a cigar shape before slicing. Rinse the greens thoroughly under cold running water and leave them in the colander to drain. If you don’t have a colander, just pat them dry with a kitchen towel.
This technique is good for pretty much any unwieldy green.
2) Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-low heat. Mince the garlic. If you’re a garlic fan, you can add an extra clove or two. Add the minced garlic to the pan and stir until it becomes golden and fragrant. If you’re using smoked paprika, add it now. By heating your aromatics in the oil, you’re essentially making a very quick infused oil that will evenly flavor the dish. Smoked paprika adds a nice sweet smokiness to vegetarian dishes.
3) Raise the heat to medium and add the greens, stirring them so that they’re coated in the oil. Add salt and pepper. Continue to stir the greens for about five minutes, or until they begin to wilt. Depending on the size of your pan, you may need to add only a few handfuls of greens at a time, let them wilt, then add some more. If the greens aren’t wilting fast enough, try adding a splash of water and covering the pan for a few minutes. The trapped heat and steam should wilt any stubborn greens.
4) Add the can of beans, including the bean juice. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes, or until the starchy bean liquid reaches a slightly creamy consistency.
Variations
If you want to up the sweetness factor of this dish, try sauteing some chopped onion with the garlic.
If you’d like a soupier end result, add about a cup of chicken or vegetable broth before bringing to a simmer.
If you want to make this a little less vegetarian, start off by cooking a few strips of bacon in the pan. Set the bacon aside, and then substitute the rendered bacon fat in the pan with the olive oil. Crumble the bacon back into the pan when the mixture’s done simmering.
Where the magic happens.
I grew up cooking with my family, and some of my earliest memories involve helping my parents in the kitchen. By elementary school my younger sister and I could scramble eggs, mix pancakes, and pinch dumpling wrapper around homemade potsticker filling. When I moved across the country to go to college in the Pacific Northwest, I quickly learned to start cooking for myself. Once I got the hang of it, cooking became one of my favorite ways to relax and enjoy myself.
After a while, though, I noticed something. Very few of my college-age friends knew how to cook. Some lived off instant noodles and fast food. One, when asked to wash some vegetables, did so with soap and hot water.
So in addition to cooking for my friends on a regular basis, I started to incorporate basic cooking instruction into these dinner parties and potlucks.
Because here’s the secret that Stouffer’s doesn’t want you to know.
Cooking is extremely easy.
For the time and effort it takes you to make a box of powdered mac and cheese, you can invent a basic pasta dish from scratch. For the amount of money it takes to buy a value meal at McDonald’s, you can make a delicious meal for two. Or even four.
I’ve been sharing recipes, tips, and advice with my friends for a while, both online and off. I recently moved out of a dingy apartment into a house with a kitchen worth taking pictures of. It seemed high time to create a place to organize my cooking thoughts. So here we are.
What should you expect from Knives Out? An irreverent cooking blog that’s part how-to, part recipe diary, and part personal history. In addition to recipes, I’ll talk about basic skills you can use to make your own improvisational meals. The majority of the recipes featured here will reflect the way I cook for myself and will probably be inexpensive, nutritious, and light on meat. That doesn’t mean I won’t feature the occasional steak, though.
Updates should show up about once or twice a week. Get your knives out.
