Posted by Loulou on Sep 8, 2014 | 4 comments

Strained, smooth beet soup with avocado

Okay, okay, sometimes beets are right up there with liver on anthros’ hit list, but I like BOTH, just not together…unless it’s beet ravioli with butter and sage, and then afterward, seared liver, still pink in the middle. Num, num.

Liver–I’ll take it any time, any day, fellow liver-lovers.

Beets–well, mama makes a soup that makes you want to eat it just because of the color.  Our famous guru neighbour who sends up buckets of fresh produce from his garden gathered (I almost wrote “fathered”, haha, but it’s not far off) in the spring picked all of his beet crop, and mama froze her share in little pieces.  A few days ago, she unfroze them and put them in a big pot with chicken broth and a sweet onion, chopped, and simmered them until they were tender.  Then she went at them with that magic frapper that makes me leave the room when she turns it on, and voilá, a beet soup fit for the Czar.

However—mama puts many of her soups through a sieve or what she calls a chinois but it doesn’t look Chinese to me! Maybe it’s because of it’s shape all pointy like Chinese laborer hats.

So—what comes out is a silky smooth soup that she then chills and serves with a spoon of crème fraiche in the middle, or chopped hard-boiled eggs, or today’s new thing: chopped avocado! Hey, yogurt’s fine, too, but not the light one…use the really good one that’s like sour cream (a little in dish for your kitty will make her/his day…).

The other thing she does is cut the beets into really fine slices, brushes them with olive oil and then roasts them in a hot oven for 30 minutes, tops and all. The tops come out with the texture of cotton candy and literally disappear in your mouth! She let me taste them one night and I said, “Whoa, what was THAT?” because they were gone in a split second but left a nice crispy taste.

Now after the beets are strained, what’s left is a nice thick pulp that you can mix with ricotta and parmesan and use to stuff your ravioli. Mama says it’s a delicacy of the area around the Dolomites in Italy, and the ravioli come out all PINK!  You can find the recipe in an article by Judy Ziedler, which is sort of about mama and papa and ravioli and other things…

Hmmm…maybe next Valentine’s mama will make these for papa again and save the ricotta’s for ME.

Tomorrow mama’s making kale ravioli and I’ll take some pics!

After a nap…I’m more interested in shut-eye than shutter speed, haha.