Ingredients (all organic if possible):
Beets (approximately 4 cups eventually cut into bite sized pieces)
½ Can (13.5 oz can) Thick Coconut Milk
or
6 oz water
7 oz coconut milk powder (blend together for thick coconut milk)
½ teaspoon Celtic Sea Salt
½ teaspoon lemon pepper (fresh pepper is okay)
2 oz apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon honey (or one heaping tablespoon powdered erythritol)
½ cup blue cheese crumbles (or more, depending on taste)
½ cup walnuts (optional)
Salad leaves from your favorite salad green (we used Rainbow Chard, leaves and stems)
Canned beats can be substituted, but some like their beets crispy. Keep in mind, the crispier the beet, the harder to digest. Some have made this salad with raw beets, grated. I’ve tried this; it’s tasty, but again, a bit harder to digest.
Directions
First make the sauce. Mix up your coconut milk, add salt, lemon pepper, apple cider vinegar and honey (see below for a heart healthy option), and and stir in the blue cheese crumbles.
Clean and peel, then cut up the beets into chunks and, in a shallow baking dish with a bit of water, bake them at
- 350 for 30 – 40 minutes if you like crispy beets;
- 350 for 1 hour – 1 hour and ten minutes if you like them baked fully;
- Air Frying – Set on roast, around 170 degrees for 17 – 20 minutes (take out and shake them all up half way through;
You can treat the beets like potatoes and roast them at 425 for 45 minutes, but I am very much into the Low Temp cooking fad; I don’t like to hurt my food. Temps over 350 degrees can damage the food and deplete some of the nutrition. The exception is air frying because the beets spend less time at the higher heat.
Now, you’ve got your beets in chunks, let them cool and chop them up into bite sized pieces. (Although you could have done that before baking, but then you’d bake them for shorter times.)
Take one medium sized beet (add up the chunks to equal one medium sized beet), and toss it in the blender or Nutribullet with the coconut milk and blend thoroughly (liquefy).
Pour this into a bowl, and add the salt, pepper, vinegar, and blue cheese crumbles, and whisk.
Cut up the beets into bite sized pieces (if you haven’t done so yet), and stir into the sauce. Before serving, tear up the salad leaves, and stir those in. We used Rainbow Chard, which was just fabulous. You can serve topped with walnuts if you like.
One secret is to stir up the beets with the sauce and let sit overnight in the fridge. Then add the salad leaves (and nuts) just before serving.
Note!
This should be eaten up right away. Why? Because blue cheese has mold. That’s what makes it blue cheese. And if you let anything you make with blue cheese sit in the fridge, mold will grow all over it and spoil it. So, serve this and finish it off. It’s, as the British say, “Brilliant!”
Heart Healthy Option
Because of all my experiments with Pomegranate Juice Powder, I’ve modified this recipe just a bit.
Instead of the honey, add half a cup of Pomegranate Juice Powder, and make up your sauce that way.
If your sauce is too thin (it can happen) add half a teaspoon of xanthan gum and blend (before you add the blue cheese crumbles).