Pickled Beet Salad with Crosnes

Only no Crosnes...I'll get to that.

Long time no post huh? Well, that thing I call a day job has been keeping me busy as well as triathlon training. I actually did THREE recipes from the book this weekend...I'll give this quick one to you first. My cooking has been limited to quick pasta dishes and throwing a bunch of stuff from the CSA in a pan. Which kind of brings me to this dish...

We joined the The Student Sustainable Farm at Rutgers this year. They have a CSA program (for those who don't know what a CSA is, click here) that seemed right up our alley. It's still early in the season, but we've been getting some really good stuff. Lots of greens, beets, broccoli, carrots, etc... I began to collect a bunch of beets, and had to do something with them, then remembered this simple recipe from the book. I love me some beets.

The recipe calls for 3 different types of beets, some standard ingredients for the pickling liquid, and for the salad, crosnes. 'Crosnes are small pale tubers native to China and Japan, where they are considered a sign of good luck' -- well my friends, apparently the local Asian markets are all out of luck, as am I as I couldn't source any. No worries, I pressed on. (But I did get encouraged to try a health drink sample at the Hong Kong supermarket, and when I asked why it was so good, the nice girl said 'it will make you regular!' -- awesome.

I also didn't have 3 different type of beets.

I had these. 

Which I roasted, to look like this...

And then make a pickling liquid with all of this...

Then I simply put 1and1 together..and had this!

Pickled Beets. 

The remainder of the recipe was also pretty simple...pickle the crosnes the same way, toss from frisee with some pickling liquid. Although, I'm not clear of if it should be the liquid from the jar of pickled beets or some reserved left over liquid. I, unfortunately, didn't think about that and had to use the liquid from the beet jar. 

One to match the book. 

Thoughts: If you have beets, pickle them, with this recipe. Tomorrow, I think I'll simply just bring a jar of pickled beets to work for lunch and look like a fool eating them out of the jar. I loved the way it dressed the salad, but Laurie didn't seem to care for it much. Due to triathlon training and too much Scotch drinking, we didn't do the wine pairing. I'm way slacking in my Zraly's wine course....I need to get on that.