Thursday, May 5, 2011

A somewhat failed experiment

Sometimes I get ideas that don't make sense.
I was sitting in the car in one of our recent long drives, and tried to think of new recipes.
Mostly I thought about my recent discovery: Beets are great. It was news to me, and having never used them before, I thought it was time for a change.
For some reason the first thing I thought about was the visual aspect (which is usually the wrong thing to do), and I came up with something that was destined to fail.
I recently made a vegan Rosé sauce (tomatoes and cream) using mashed carrots instead of cream. It was really good (I wanted to post it but I didn't have any decent pictures). So I thought I can make two sauces, with very strong colors, one with beets, and one with carrots, and in some way put them both on a plate in a way that would be appealing. It wasn't.

I bought a pastry bag so I could be very accurate and create some sort of pattern of the sauces, however I didn't expect them to be so thick, and it was more like making shapes with purees, the first outcome looked so bad I had to destroy it before anyone took a picture.
As I said, it's usually wrong to think about the visual aspect before thinking about the flavors, and once again I started by telling you about how bad it looked, let me assure you though, it did taste really good. I think you should give it a try. You may not have to make it as two different sauces as i did, because I ended up mixing them in to one cool pink sauce (so it'll look a little less bad).

Pasta with beets and carrots:


carrot sauce:

4 carrots, peeled and cut into rings.
1 onion, cut into half rings.
2 garlic cloves, chopped.
Thyme.
Olive oil.
Dry chili.
Salt and pepper.
White wine.

Preparation:

- In a large saucepan, heat oil, add the onion, chili and thyme, and fry for a few minutes.
- Add in the carrots and garlic, fry for a few more minutes, then add a splash of white wine, cover, and let simmer for a few more minutes, until the carrots are quite soft.

This one is basically done, for this recipe you now have to mince it with a hand mixer. (Also for the vegan Rosé, just mix this puree with tomato sauce).
Beet sauce:

5-7 cooked beets.
2 garlic cloves.
1 onion.
2 Tbs tomato paste.
Parsley.
Few leaves of mint.
Olive oil.

Preparation:

- In a large saucepan, heat oil, add the onion, chili and thyme, and fry for a few minutes.
- Add garlic, after two minutes add all the rest, stir for a minute more, then remove from fire.
- Mince well.

You now have two pretty nice purees, make pasta (I used spaghetti, which wasn't the best choice, I think short pasta would be better, preferably Farfalle).

No comments:

Post a Comment