Root veg kaleidoscope.

Steamed carrot slaw with roasted beets. © Ryan Schierling

The challenge: Create an unforgettable side dish from random items in your refrigerator before time runs out. Who will rise to the occasion, and who will be… CHOPPED.

(WE INTERRUPT THIS POST FOR COPYRIGHT LIABILITY REASONS. IN THIS CONTEXT, THE TERM “CHOPPED” MIGHT BE A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF TELEVISION FOOD NETWORK G.P. AND ITS AFFILIATES. CONTINUED IMPLIED USAGE AND/OR VIOLATION WILL RESULT IN TED ALLEN’S HANDLERS ASCERTAINING YOUR LOCATION IN FETCHING BLACK HELICOPTERS, DESCENDING ON YOUR KITCHEN, WHERE YOU WOULD BE… BOPPED. IF THERE ARE ANY BISCUITS AROUND, YOU MAY BE… SOPPED. REGARDLESS OF THE CONTEXT, YOU WILL BE… STOPPED. UNLESS YOU ARE ABLE TO DEFEAT MASAHARU MORIMOTO AT THE IRON CHEF AMERICA NINTENDO Wii GAME. ALLEZ-CUISINE!!*)

I'm fairly certain I would be a terrible contestant on one of those competition-based cooking shows. You know the ones where contestants have to execute something spectacular in under 20 minutes with a limited number of disparate ingredients? Not a minute to spare rethinking or redoing anything? I’d probably knock it out of the park about one in three rounds, and full-on crash and burn the rest. Pressure cooker situations are just not for a planner like me. However, that’s not to say I don't enjoy rising to a challenge when the opportunity presents itself.

Root down.

Roasted beet and cranberry soup with pickled beet greens. © Ryan Schierling

I've been told a number of times that I could make soup out of anything. For a while, I took that as a challenge. Some days it meant mind-bendingly turning a leftover chickpea, feta and black olive salad into African peanut soup. Other days it meant making proper stock and clearing the crisper (read as: rotter) drawers of our refrigerator. Have you ever made lettuce consommé? No, you haven't, and you don't want to. Soup – as the saying goes – may be good food but it is also, occasionally, a grim test of a cook's mettle.

All of the tried-and-true classics are already in cans, so the challenge is to either make a soup can soup better, or make something that no one's thought of yet. The problem is, I did some research on the internet and apparently, everything's already been thought of already, soup or otherwise… and it's on a blog, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Pinterest, or whatever.

This information overload pushes me back toward simplicity, and sometimes that's the best thing about the massive, endless, big old stupid-head internet. I turn the computer off, scribble the first three ingredients that come to mind on a scrap of empty envelope and race to the grocery store. That's it, and it's soup. I don't need truffle oil for this, or wild game, or heirloom anything.

Now, it's winter. I want to make something that's a foil to the chill, the wind and the frost, but celebrates the meager ingredients available in this coldest of seasons. So far, we've put together potato chowder with roasted green chiles, proper Texas red, and chicken stock with chunks of onion and carrot and gently-simmered pesto-filled tortellini. All are simple, and filled with robust flavors that shine on their own.

Root to leaf.

Stuffed beets with greens. © Ryan Schierling

Ryan didn't grow up eating beets quite the way I did. What he remembers was more of the canned or pickled variety, which (unsurprisingly) didn't put beets on his "must have more of this" list. Although I'm not sure he'll ever recover entirely from this early aversion, it has been my great pleasure to share my appreciation of beets with him. So far, as long as I'm not asking him to eat a whole, roasted beet plain and keeping some goat cheese on hand, he's very much enjoying them.

We grew beets in our garden when I was little, and I loved them. There were a great many things from that garden that were canned or frozen every year in our home, but I don't remember beets being among them. It's a pretty good bet that it was limited, primarily-seasonal fair, which may have added to my attraction, as it was a pretty special deal to get beets and greens for dinner.

I was a picky enough eater as a kid. I hated fresh tomatoes (yes, even those sweet, perfect ones straight from the garden), fresh mushrooms, and green beens (unless they were either raw or canned French cut – go figure). But a few of the common culprits kids get picky about were on my favorites list. I loved broccoli, cauliflower and – to my mother's great astonishment – even brussel sprouts. Thanks to my parents' big garden and the mysteries of taste bud genetics, I enjoyed a lot of pretty delicious things straight from the earth as a child, beets among them. Beets were also my first introduction to cooked greens, and beet tops remain my favorite green to this day.

My mom was blessedly straightforward with the beet preparation. She usually cooked/steamed the beets on the stovetop with a little water. Or maybe she roasted them. I only remember them being deeply purple, tender and sweet. She never missed an opportunity to use the greens, either. She would simmer up those tops, add a little salt and finish them with a good squeeze of lemon juice (or more likely in those days, ReaLemon®). They were delicious eaten with the beets.

And so, the inspiration for these stuffed beets – using the whole beet. Simple flavors with pairs of compliments: goat cheese for the beets, lemon for the greens. Together, an earthy, sweet and tangy kind of pleasure. We prefer more vs. less goat cheese because it is just so delicious with the sweetness of the beets, but the truth is that you could omit it entirely and still have a very delicious beet.

Large beets are a side dish so fantastic that they could very well steal the show from your entree. Small beets make a perfect 'knife and fork' appetizer and the tiniest are a single, simple amuse bouche.

Humble beginnings.

Borscht meez. © Ryan Schierling

I didn't learn to cook until I had to. 

Which is to say, I didn't learn to cook until I moved away from home at the tender age of 19. I had a flimsy aluminum stock pot, a hand-me-down cutting board the size of a postcard, and a dangerously dull chef's knife I bought at a secondhand store. What I didn't have was any money. Groceries were budgeted to a paltry $25 a week, which quickly made a thin vegetarian out of me. Meat was far more expensive per pound, and I needed cheap ingredients that would stretch meals through the next payday. Soups were the easiest to make, reheat, and reheat again. I could get half a week's meals out of one pot full of vegetable stew, or 13-bean soup, or the very first thing I ever scratch-cooked after moving out on my own – borscht. 

I'd purchased a used, entirely nondescript, plain yellow-jacketed cookbook called "Ann Seranne's Good Food Without Meat" at a flea market for a dollar. It looked like a bad school textbook, with no photographs and a tiny, squinty font. Originally published in 1973, Seranne had been a food consultant and former editor at Gourmet magazine, and was primarily known for her dessert cookbooks. I had no interest in dessert. I could barely afford a proper main course. 

Chapter one of "Ann Seranne's Good Food Without Meat" was soups, so I figured I'd start there. The first three recipes were Potage bonne femme maigre, Soup a l'aoignon maigre, and Minestrone di verdura, all very much out of my league. I certainly couldn't cook what I couldn't pronounce, and anyway, didn't "Potage bonne femme maigre" mean something like "Soup made from the juices of a good woman?"