Beef, Legumes, Tubers, Roots

Menu: Cuban brisket with black beans * roasted beet salad * baked sweet potato

The farmers market yielded yellow squash, okra, three kinds of cherry tomatoes, white eggplant, Italian zucchini, salad cucumbers, and peaches. All to be planned into menus for the week. I still had a handful of beets left from the previous week, so roasted those up, pulled out a packet of pre-cooked brisket (another H-E-B timesaving trick) and a can of Goya beans, and rummaged a huge sweet potato from the pantry.

Cuban brisket
A fancy name for a process that entails heating up beans in olive oil in a large skillet, adding the brisket, pasilla chile powder, and fresh lime juice, then simmering. Serve over yellow rice, with tortillas, or plain.

Roasted beet salad
4 beets, greens and tail removed
leafy herbs (choose one like mint or basil; tonight I used Mexican marjoram)
nuts (choose from walnuts, pine nuts, pepitas, hazelnuts; tonight, pepitas)
crumble-able cheese (choose from feta, blue, even tiny mozzarella pearls; tonight, feta)
specialty vinegar (choosed from balsamic, champagne, cane, white wine, etc.; tonight, Steen’s cane vinegar)
oil (choose from olive oil, walnut oil, hazelnut oil, etc.; tonight, olive)
fresh-ground salt
fresh-ground pepper
garlic (fresh-ground, very finely diced)
Preheat oven to 400. Wrap each beet individually in foil; bake 45 min to 1 hr. Let cool; peels will rub right off. Cut into quarters; slice each quarter in thin slices. Toss in bowl with salt, vinegar, oil, and garlic. Add nuts, cheese, and herbs to taste. Will change anyone’s mind ever about beets.

Sweet potato
Roast whole in jacket in oven (while roasting beets). Peel, mash or puree. Can be served plain, with spices (crushed red pepper ground over is good, as are Indian spices), or with sweets (a drizzle of Steen’s cane syrup being our favorite). Tonight’s was already sweet enough on its own, so we served it plain and found it delicious.

For dessert, we put Bailey in the back seat and drove up to Amy’s Ice Cream, where I had a tiny of coffee amaretto and M had a small of mocha almond chip.