Three Summer Recipes: Cold, Cooked Beets

Beets are an amazing food. Vibrant crimson in color, nutritious, and wonderfully versatile, they're good chilled in summer and hot in winter. Boiled and served as a side dish, they're delicate but toothsome in texture and have a mild, nutty flavor.

As I write this, it's summer in New York City, and the sun is glaring down from above a low cloud cover which does nothing to dispel its heat. It's hard to imagine cooking anything just now. It is precisely at times like this that leftover cooked beets, which can keep for more than a week in the refrigerator without any change in flavor or texture, are a useful thing to have around.

Of course, they have to be cooked at some point before they're eaten. Many stores sell packaged, peeled and boiled beets: these are perfectly acceptable. Canned beets are less so in my opinion, but there are people who like them even better. The most reasonable approach, however, is probably to boil your own. You can boil up a large batch on some relatively cool night, refrigerate the leftovers, and use them for days afterward.

To retain the flavor, nutrients, and cancer-fighting benefits of beets, do not overcook them. Boil them without peeling them first, and leave the root and an inch or so of stem. Run them under cold water after removing them from the pot, then peel and slice. Cooked beets can be stored in the refrigerator for a week or two, and in the freezer for longer than that, all without damage to their taste or nutritional value.

Before we move on to the recipes, a word of caution for the uninitiated. Beets turn everything they touch a vivid fuchsia color. And I do mean everything. Please keep this in mind when eating beets because - and I will try to put this delicately - they will tint everything that emerges from you for the next 24 hours. This is completely harmless, but it is also unavoidable, and it can be startling to the unwary.

Beet Yogurt