Ashed Goat Cheese and Beets

If you are ever looking for a quick and easy (well, relatively) TFLC recipe to start with, this is a good candidate!

First, I roasted a bunch of golden and regular red beets in foil.  Forgot to take pictures of them.  My bad.

I also "juiced" a bunch of beets in my Vitamix (see beet murder for pictures), and put the juice in a pan to reduce.

The upside of "juicing" the beets in the Vitamix was that my pulp was all strained out afterwards.  The French Laundry Cookbook says to spread the pulp on parchment and microwave for like an hour.  I thought this sounded like an exceptionally bad idea (not to mention a massive waste of energy!), so I put it in a barely-on oven with the door propped a little open.  Yes, it took 6 hours to have powdery beets... but the upside is that my house was a little warmer!  (although I live in San Diego, summer hasn't been around in a couple of years... my house is ALWAYS cold!).  After the pulp was all dried and shriveled, I put it in the Vitamix and blended.  You could totally see the air pattern in the mixer - it was awesome!

Finally I cut the cheese (heh), into 7 portions (one extra since I had an extra person for dinner).  A beautiful ashy goat.

Everything being done, it was time to plate!  I used a round mold to cut the golden beets, and julienned the red ones.  I also put a line of beet juice down the side.  One was absolutely perfect, the rest sucked - messy beet juice everywhere.  But I bet you can guess which one I took a picture of :)

Finally, sprinkled a little beet powder, finished with some pea shoots (I can't remember what kind of greens I was supposed to use... but I do remember I couldn't find it).

Pretty!

The reaction: great amongst the not-picky crowd, not so great with the picky crowd.  I loved the beets.  I did not, however, manage to change my brother-in-law's opinion about the beets.  Or the "weird" cheese... but no worries, it didn't go to waste - lots of forks dived in to grab a bite.

And my bonus picture - after I was cleaning up a chive oil bowl and beet glaze pan.. it totally looked like Christmas in my sink.  I'm thinking this is going to be my Christmas card next year.