When you understand that vegetables can be spectacular and that, depending on how you cook and combine them, you can bring out their best qualities, then you have a lot of gain in cooking and enjoying it.
Today's recipe is a great example of this and that you don't need a piece of meat to make a dish tasty: it's perfect on its own for a pica-pica dinner
,
accompanied by good bread.
The cooking method goes a long way here: beets and carrots score a thousand points in flavor, texture, and color when you roast them.
They become sweeter because their own sugar caramelizes, they take on nutty notes and are roasted to become crisp on the outside, with a golden hue that screams “eat me”.
Beets, especially, are intensified when baked whole and with the skin on, so I recommend that you look for ones that are not very large so that they cook this way more quickly.
Is it wrong, then, to cook them in water, steam or even in the microwave?
No, of course not, but you will get different results that may well be those sought on other occasions.
To take advantage of the fact that we have turned on the oven, we will add to this dish some spiced chickpeas that we will cook just during the last minutes of roasting the vegetables.
In this case they have turmeric, garlic powder and hot paprika but you can add the spices and/or herbs that you like the most.
At the base of this dish we have
labneh
, a kind of drained and concentrated yogurt, fresh and milky, which contrasts very well with the spiciness of the chickpeas and the sweetness of the beetroot and carrots (this fresh-spicy-sweet trio is something useful to keep in mind when thinking about your dishes).
To prepare the
labneh
you can follow the step by step of this video.
If you don't want or have the time to do it, you can replace it with unsweetened Greek yogurt.
Difficulty
The one to find small beets.
Ingredients
for 4 people
6 small beets
2 or 3 carrots
350 g labneh or unsweetened Greek yogurt
200 g of cooked chickpeas
½ teaspoon hot paprika
½ teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon garlic powder
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt
freshly ground black pepper
Preparation
Heat the oven to 200 °C.
Wash the beets and carrots well.
Cut the thinnest stem and the stems from the beets, leaving 1 cm (save the leaves and stems for other preparations).
Peel the carrots, cut them into quarters lengthwise (if they are very long, cut them in half first).
Place the carrots and beets in a bowl and add extra virgin olive oil, fine salt and freshly ground black pepper.
If you want to add an herb like rosemary or a few cloves of garlic, you can do that too.
Stir it so that all the beets and carrots are well impregnated.
Place them on a baking tray (do not occupy the entire oven because you will have to put another tray with the chickpeas) and cover it with aluminum foil.
Bake them for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a bowl, mix the chickpeas with three tablespoons of olive oil, fine salt, hot paprika, turmeric, garlic powder and black pepper.
Mix everything well and arrange it on another baking sheet in a single layer if possible.
Put it in the oven once the first 20 minutes of cooking the vegetables have elapsed.
Remove foil and bake vegetables another 20 minutes or until tender.
The carrots should be golden brown and the skin of the beets wrinkled.
On a plate make a base with the labneh and place the spiced chickpeas on top.
Peel the beets, remove the stems and cut them into quarters.
Place them on top of the chickpeas along with the carrots.
Finish with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, black pepper and some fresh herb of your choice.
If you make this recipe, share the result on your social networks with the hashtag #RecipesComidista. And if it goes wrong, complain to the Defender of the Cook by sending an email to defensoracomidista@gmail.com.
