Recipes with Beets

A salad with beet and chicken is light and healthy but it’s so delicious that even those who hate “healthy” food will be jealous. Everyone knows the benefits of beets, which can be boiled or roasted.

This beet and prune salad is simple, amazingly tasty and incredibly healthy. It works great as a side dish and as a healthy snack, if you are watching your kilograms and wanting to improve your overall digestion. It is very important to use sweet and rich red color beets for this salad. So when buying beets check carefully that they don’t look pink or white, and that they are fresh and firm. You can use different methods to cook beets - boil, roast or cook in the microwave . If you value your time and don’t want to wait for hours for the beets to cook, check out our suggestions on how to cook beet in the microwave. There are two ways to tell if the beets are ready: they start to smell yummy, or if you poke them with a fork it’ll go in easily. The beets that are well-cooked will have the skin almost slide off when you touch it. Using a paring knife to remove the skin works way better than a vegetable peeler, alternatively you can also use a paper towel to slide off the skins. Prunes are an important ingredient in this salad. Their sweetness, chewy texture and mild taste compliments the flavors of beet. Prunes are full of nutrients and is a great source of fiber, adding prunes to your salads can significantly improve your overall digestion. You can learn more about health benefits of prunes by reading the summary of some studies. Walnuts is another important ingredient in beet and prune salad. They have higher antioxidant activity and more healthy omega-3 fats than any other common nut, they help reduce inflammation and improve heart disease risk factors. It is important to use good quality walnuts - old walnuts can be bitter and will make your beet and prune salad taste bitter as well.

You have probably enjoyed the sweet, earthy flavor of beet more than once, and might have heard that beets are packed with nutrients like folate, manganese, potassium and fiber, and thus should be included in you healthy diet on a regular basis. Nevertheless beets often get rejected in many kitchens due to the long and often messy process of cooking. While they can take hours to boil or cook in the oven, it takes only a few minutes to prepare beets in the microwave. Microwaving fresh beets preserves more nutrients and it is a much easier and quicker way than cooking them any other way, and less messy too! If you decide to try and cook beet in the microwave, make sure you select your beets correctly. Always use beets that are approximately the same size to ensure even cooking. Look for smaller beets as they are usually more tender than the big ones. You must also ensure that the container you want to use in the microwave is suitable for the task, and has the right size. An 8 x 8 x 2-inch square glass dish with a lid or a round dish of a similar size in diameter is ideal. It should be enough to fit 7 small to medium beets. Avoid using containers that are too big. Do not overload the container with beets. Microwaving works best for beets in quantities of up to 1 pound; otherwise, the beets may cook unevenly. It is often faster to microwave two successive batches than it is to cook beets in one batch by a slower method. If you know your microwave oven well enough to get the timing right, the beets always turn out just the way you want. If you’re cooking beet in your microwave for the first time, don’t be afraid to experiment and adjust the timing according to the power of your microwave. Enjoy and stay healthy!

This healthy and colorful salad can be a perfect addition to meat dishes, and also serve as a nice meal on its own if you prefer to pursue a vegetarian lifestyle. Beet is well-known for its indispensable health benefits. Betacyanin, a colorful pigment in beet, is an antioxidant that can significantly help your liver get rid of toxins, and thus improve its main function to keep your body clean by absorbing all the harmful chemicals from your blood. Beet also contains betaine, a substance can be used to help with some forms of depression due to its ability to relax your mind and improve general sense of well being. For healthy reasons we prefer using homemade sauces and condiments to those bought in a supermarket. There is value in making something from scratch, and you can always control what comes in a recipe and what quality product comes out of it. We used homemade pickled red onions for this beet salad. We recommend marinating some onions at the same time as you start cooking beet, or even some time in advance, it can be perfectly stored in the fridge and used for other dishes. We know that a lot of people out there like beet but don’t like to bother with cooking it because the process seems time and energy consuming. If you are one of those people, we invite you to check out our *How to cook beet* (or Easy ways to cook beet). We hope you like this beet salad as much as we do, and will learn to love beet not only for its health benefits but also for its taste and color!