Recipe: Rainbow Beet and Carrot Salad with Garden Herbs

What’s better than eating food that tastes delicious? Eating food that tastes AND looks delicious! Beets and carrots are the secret ingredients to liven up your salad. Combine these colorful vegetables and fresh herbs to create a salad that tastes like spring.

This excerpt is fromThe Occidental Arts and Ecology Center Cookbook by The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center with Olivia Rathbone. It has been adapted for the web.

Photo Credit: Tali Aiona.

Beets come in a surprising variety of colors, shapes, and sizes—red, golden, white, and candy-striped, round and cylindrically shaped. Some of the varieties that we have trialed in the Mother Garden include Detroit Dark Red, Crosby Flat Egyptian, Bull’s Blood, Chioggia, Burpee’s Golden, Albino Vereduna, Formanova, and various types of mangels—the ancient predecessor of modern beets that was originally raised for livestock feed.

This salad is a simple way to highlight the diversity of heirloom beet and carrot varieties in the garden. Let the natural size, shape, and color pattern of the roots tell you how they would like to be cut—whole, quartered, diagonally sliced, or cubed. Make sure to keep all the vegetables separate until plating them up at the end, otherwise the red beets bleed all over everything and you will have a fuchsia salad instead of a rainbow salad.

Ingredients

• 1 1⁄2 pounds mixed heirloom carrots and beets
• 4 sprigs fresh mitsuba, parsley, basil, or chervil
• 4 chives
• Pinch of celery seeds
• 1⁄3 cup Summer Herb Flower vinegar, plain red wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar
• 1⁄4 cup olive oil
• Salt to taste
• Garnish: edible flowers, sprigs of herbs
• 10–12 pounds mixed heirloom carrots and beets
• 1 bunch fresh mitsuba, parsley, basil, or chervil
• 1 small bunch chives
• 2 teaspoons celery seeds
• 1 1⁄2 cups Summer Herb Flower vinegar, plain red wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup olive oil
• Salt to taste
• Garnish: edible flowers, sprigs of herbs

Procedure

1. If you’re using baby beets, leave them whole. Cut large beets in half. Place the reds and Chioggias in one pot fitted with a steamer basket and the golden, yellow, and whites in another (or steam them one after another if you only have one basket).
2. With a little water in the bottom, steam the beets for 15 minutes or so until soft when pierced with a fork. Drain and allow to cool.
3. In a bowl of cold water, peel the skins with your hands and rinse, separating the varieties into individual bowls.
4. Cut the beets into cubes, quarters, or slices, and reserve in separate bowls.
5. Boil a large pot of water and prepare an ice bath for blanching.
6. Peel the carrots and cut into diagonal slices, cubes, or half-moons. Blanch each variety separately and shock in an ice bath. Reserve in separate bowls.
7. Whisk all the ingredients for the dressing together.
8. Divide the dressing evenly among the bowls of roots and toss to coat. Allow to marinate for 20 minutes or longer for larger chunks of vegetables. Taste and adjust the salt and vinegar to your liking.
9. Mound the root varieties side by side in a pleasing pattern such as rings, a yin-yang swirl, asymmetric clusters, or of course a rainbow.
10. You may serve this over a bed of raw greens such as miner’s lettuce, frisée, romaine, baby mustards, or wild arugula. Garnish with sprigs of herbs or edible flowers.

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