Roasted beets are great hot or cold. I like them leftover for salads. If you already have roasted beets on hand, add them to your salad with thinly sliced fennel, a little citrusy dressing and goat cheese, if you’ve got it.
Roasted beets with fennel
- I bunch beets, any color
- olive oil
- 1-2 bulbs fennel
- salt/pepper
Remove beet greens and reserve for another recipe. Scrub the beets and trim. Quarter the beets, or cut into eighths if very large (be smart and safe when cutting hard, round objects). In a glass baking dish, toss beets in enough olive oil to coat them (at least 2 T, probably 4T), sprinkle with salt (I like coarse salt) and pepper. Roast at 400 for 10 minutes. While roasting beets, cut stems off fennel (you can cut off the little leaves and reserve for another recipe), cut the fennel bulb in half the long way, give a rinse, and halve the halves, again the long way. Sometimes the inner core can be tough, if the fennel is very large, so you may want to remove that too.
Add your quartered fennel to the beets, tossing with the oil. Roast for another 35-40 minutes, turning over and stirring a few times. Check the beets for doneness with a fork and keep cooking if they resist being stabbed 😉
An alternative method would be to wrap whole beets in the fennel leaves, oil, salt, in individual foil wrappers and roast for an hour or more.
Beet and fennel soup is great, too! Here’s a link to a recipe from Bon Appetit: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Beet-and-Fennel-Soup-with-Kefir-362869. I substituted sour cream for the kefir and boiled the beets separately and whole (you could also roast them).