Tag Archives: beetroot

When Colours Run Riot

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24

There was a phase in the 1970s when interior design ran riot. I remem­ber my grandpa announ­cing proudly that he’d dec­or­ated the walls of his small front room with four wildly dif­fer­ent wall­pa­pers and picked out the wood­work in egg-yolk yellow.

I thought of my grandpa as I walked around David Hockney’s new exhib­i­tion A Big­ger Pic­ture at the Royal Academy in Lon­don. The exhib­i­tion is vast and over­whelm­ing and throbs with wild col­ours and pat­terns. It’s gen­er­ous, showy and utterly inde­pend­ent in spirit and yet it’s metic­u­lous and some­how dogged too — qual­it­ies that pretty much sum up my grandpa.

Walk­ing through Oxford’s Uni­ver­sity Parks later that day, I felt some­how let down that the winter branches didn’t have the vibrancy of David Hockney’s trees.

But turn­ing 180 degrees so that the sun was shin­ing on the trunks, the col­ours jumped into life. I got a whole new per­spect­ive. And if that’s not a meta­phor for life, I don’t know what is.

Muted, restrained food is the last thing I wanted after the Hock­ney tidal wave. I craved the idea of eat­ing a riot of col­our. When in that mood and at this time of year, there’s really only one choice — full throttle, lip-staining, finger-smearing, red and yel­low beet­roots. I found a bag of just such a thing for half price at Whole­foods, along with a sil­ver foil hick­ory smoker from Fin­land for £2.29.

I have a dis­astrous record at home-smoking. The last time I tried we had to evac­u­ate the house. But I figured I’d be safe in the hands of the Finns. If you want a really strong smokey fla­vour, this bag will dis­ap­point you. But for a del­ic­ate hint of smoke, without the need for a full evac­u­ation plan, this bag works fine.

SMOKED RED AND GOLDEN BEETROOT WITH GOAT’S CURD AND SMOKED GARLIC

Serves 4

  • 2 red and 2 golden beetroot
  • 4 small red onions
  • Salad leaves
  • Goat’s curd
  • 1 head garlic
  • 2 table­spoons bal­samic vinegar
  • Bunch thyme
  • 2 table­spoons olive oil
  • Black­berry vin­egar — I bought mine from Womers­ley Foods
  • 1 dis­pos­able foil smoker — bought from Whole­foods for £2.29

Wash the beet­root, but don’t bother to peel them. Slice into rounds about 1.5 to 2 cm thick. Peel the onions but leave whole. Toss the beet­root, onions, whole head of gar­lic and thyme in the olive oil and bal­samic vin­egar, sea­son and place in a single layer inside the foil smoker. Seal the foil and place in a pre-heated oven at 250 degrees C. After 15 minutes turn the heat down to 190 degrees C. Cook for a fur­ther 45 minutes. Remove the pack­age from the oven and allow to cool for 15 minutes before cut­ting open the foil. Peel the beet­root and slice into thin­nish circles.

Make a salad dress­ing from a little olive oil, black­berry vin­egar and season­ing and dress the salad leaves. Pile the beet­root, onions and scoops of goat’s curd over the leaves and trickle over a little of the bal­samic and olive oil from the smoker. After its hour of bak­ing, the gar­lic will be rich, sweet and unc­tu­ous — per­fect when spread on a little sour­dough bread.

I ate my riot­ous salad and bread with beet­root soup that I made by bak­ing beet­roots and apples for an hour and blend­ing with veget­able stock and a little grated fresh horseradish.

apple on a plate

My grandpa was wild with his col­our schemes but excep­tion­ally timid in his tastes. He would have hated this recipe. But he would have loved the ideas that lie behind it, and that’s good enough for me.

Black garlic — fashion faux pas or design classic

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9

It amuses me to see fash­ion stores from Zara to Benetton to Top­shop packed with rails of mil­it­ary capes this sea­son. How did the cape sur­vive its first out­ing, let alone get resur­rec­ted? I remem­ber plead­ing for one as a teen­ager, along with a pair of white pull-on wet-look knee-length boots. I even­tu­ally got the cape — still wait­ing for the boots.

The first thing I learned about wear­ing a cape is that the restrict­ive slits give you instant Dalek-arms. In fact, the whole sil­hou­ette is start­lingly Dalek-like. So, no, I won’t be buy­ing a cape this time round.

The food equi­val­ent of the over-rated cape has to be foam. To my mind, eat­ing foam is no tastier than lying on the beach, swill­ing the frothy water’s edge around your pal­ate like a whale siev­ing plank­ton. I’m not 100% con­vinced by any­thing ‘en croute’ either, since it’s little more than a posh pie with a swanky name.

I’ve just been to a food fair and I bought what was described as ‘the next big thing in food’. It’s black gar­lic — stand­ard white gar­lic fer­men­ted for three weeks and dried for another week. Black gar­lic tastes like liquorice crossed with rais­ins with a back fla­vour of cooked gar­lic. It has a con­sist­ency that reminds me of chest­nuts or even fruit pas­tilles. It’s reputed to have none of that fierce, pun­gent after­taste that lingers. My daugh­ter ate a whole clove and pro­nounced it to be like ‘eat­ing a candy’. And it turns out the man­u­fac­tur­ers are telling the truth — there’s abso­lutely no lingering.

But is black gar­lic just a mil­it­ary cape in dis­guise, or is it pure Chanel — eleg­ant, time­less and exquisite?

This was my fash­ion experiment.….

The Recipe: Beet­root and Black Gar­lic Bruschetta With Goat’s Cheese and Walnuts

Enough for 4

1 beet­root

4 slices sour­dough bread, toasted

8 cloves black garlic

150g goat’s cheese — the soft, creamy kind

Bal­samic vin­egar — the syr­upy kind

Hand­ful of chives

Hand­ful of wal­nuts broken up with your hands

Cut the stalk off the beet­root and place in a pan of sim­mer­ing water. Boil for half an hour or until tender. Remove from the water and once cool enough to handle, peel the outer skin off. Slice the beet­root and put to one side while you toast the sour­dough bread.

Rub one clove of black gar­lic onto each slice of toasted bread. It will dis­in­teg­rate as you rub it in. Spread each toast with the goat’s cheese fol­lowed by the beet­root. Slice the remain­ing four cloves of black gar­lic and heap onto the beet­root. Add the wal­nuts, a trickle of bal­samic and a drift of chopped chives.

The Ver­dict

I would def­in­itely buy black gar­lic again and I would cer­tainly pre­pare it like this again. It’s still not quite Chanel, but Chanel wasn’t Chanel in the beginning.