My nine-year-old son invented this method of preparing beets, and it’s really tasty! Only slightly eclipsed by my five-year-old son’s suggestion that we have roasted cheese puffs for dinner.

I didn’t think I liked beets at all, but we got some from our CSA over the summer – I tried roasting them, and quickly became a convert. One day my son said, “Why don’t we grate them and toast them?” Well, we did. We grated them, tossed them with a little olive oil, and put them in the toaster oven, on “toast.” The result was wonderful! It really smells like burnt sugar as they cook, so sweet are beets. We stirred them around a little bit, and cooked them until they started to turn very dark and caramelize. They’re lovely, because you get little patches of bright, juicy beets, and little pockets of crispy, caramelized beets. We salted them and loaded them with freshly ground pepper, and tossed them in a salad. Last night I made a salad with lots of different greens, Malcolm’s beets, goat cheese, hazelnuts, tomatoes, olive oil & balsamic. Malcolm also had the bright idea of putting grated, toasted beets into a tomato sauce, which adds a nicely sweet and earthy element to the acidic sauce. If you don’t have a toaster oven, you can roast them in a hot regular oven, and it should work just as well.

Here’s one of my sons’ favorite songs at the moment, M.I.A.’s Hussel. Hello my friend, hello my friend, hello my friend, yes it’s me!