Beets and Cookie Dough
Beware the Cookie Dough
Don’t panic – I didn’t decide to turn yesterday’s beets into cookies. Boy, that would have gone over even worse than what I did do with them. At first I intended to cook the beets and put them in a salad with our grilled chicken. I was going to use the beet greens in the salad too. But when Louisa heard my plan, she was ready to boycott dinner entirely. Remember how I feared that I would influence the girls with my food biases? Well, too late. Louisa claims that she thinks beets taste like dirt, all on her own. Right.
So I changed my plan and did what I felt was the safest preparation for the beets. I cut them up and roasted them with olive oil, finishing them with a little sea salt, which is one of my favorite ways to prepare most root vegetables. Guess what? They weren’t half bad. They had just a bit of the earthy dirt flavor, but mostly they tasted like a roasted root vegetable. Joe loved them, Annie ate them without complaining. So only Louisa gagged while they were going down.
I also used the greens. I steamed them, chopped them, and sauteed them with a little olive oil and garlic, with a final drizzle of sesame oil to complete the dish. They tasted like spinach to me, but that’s where Louisa drew the line. She couldn’t swallow them, and I became tired of seeing cooked greens hanging from her mouth in a semi chewed condition. She was excused from the table.
I would call this a successful first experiment with beets in my kitchen, and I’m sure there will be many more throughout the summer, despite Louisa’s melodramatics. But I don’t expect to get as carried away as Mark Bittman reported in his blog yesterday, where he whipped up a Beet Cocktail for a friend who is obsessed with beets. Imagine, obsessed with beets? I mean they’re very pretty to look at, as long as they don’t stain your hands and clothing. But obsessed?
By now you may be wondering what about the cookie dough? Well there was a small piece of news to report, that got past me last week. Unfortunately, Nestle Toll House cookie dough was found to be contaminated with that dreadful E.coli H7:157 bacteria. No one is sure how it got into the cookies, since there’s no beef to be found in the recipe. The greater concern with cookie dough, as any mom will tell you, is salmonella contamination from the eggs. The FDA is investigating the source of the contamination, but I guess the best advice I can give is if you use those tubs of cookie dough, don’t eat the dough raw assuming the eggs have been pasteurized and is safe. And you should bake your cookies crispy, no matter how much you like them soft and chewy. Better yet, make your own cookie dough to minimize the amount of exposure your ingredients have had to possibly contaminated factories.
Comments
Got something to say?