These Salt-Baked Beets and Goat Cheese Make Healthy Eating Taste Decadent

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Food

These Salt-Baked Beets and Goat Cheese Make Healthy Eating Taste Decadent

You need a healthy seasonal alternative to all that mac and cheese you’ve been eating all winter.

Tom Robbins wrote a whole novel about the beet, or, at least, the root vegetable played a crucial role in the narrative. Robbins made the claim that the beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon. That seems like a bit much to us (plus a serious underestimation of the moon), but the beet does make us feel poetic: it tastes like the underground where it grew up, and it bleeds the color of what runs through our own veins.

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And have you ever baked beets? Their skins turn black and crack open, sizzling with their blood-red juice. Peeling them post-oven, your kitchen looks like a crime scene. The beet is definitely the vegetable of carnage, in other words, and the vegetable of sex.

OK, even if bleeding vegetables aren't exciting to you, the beet is a healthy seasonal alternative to all that mac and cheese you've been eating all winter. Yes, believe it. They taste starchy and rich, and even better topped with a pile of creamy, tangy goat cheese.

And with a little fat in the form of hazelnuts to balance out that earthy flavor, this recipe offers a delicious side dish, or, when paired with a simple green salad, an easy weeknight meal.

RECIPE: Salt-Baked Beets

You can't beat beets, when it comes down to it.