Beets, potatoes: bounty of fall

It’s cold out there in the garden, the leaves are crusted with frozen slush, and the snow tires are still in the trunk of the car. The tomato plants still leave your hands smelling like summer, but, it’s time to move on.

Summer’s bounty sits in the pantry teasing us, fragrant with the musk of garden dirt, tubs of tubers crowd out the canned goods.

OK, maybe you’re faking it with a harvest from the local produce stand. No matter. It’s time to appreciate the flavor festival stored up in those brown, purple, red and gold earthy vegetables our northern gardens are famous for. Potatoes and beets!

You can’t go wrong with these tasty vegetables to take the chill off after a hard day digging in those fall bulbs and cleaning up the garden. The New World potato and the European beet are rich in potassium, fiber, and carbohydrates making them a great winter food. Unfortunately, while potatoes have a favored place in the produce department, the luscious beet remains underappreciated and often hard to find outside of the local farmer’s market.

Never a beet fan, I was surprised by how slow-roasted thick sliced beets take on a rich sweet flavor that is most … “unbeet-like.”

Those peach gold and deep ruby red beets sliced into thick rounds, rolled in virgin olive oil, sprinkled with kosher salt and cracked pepper and roasted until tender are a perfect complement to a roast.

“They don’t taste like dirt that way,” laughed local farmer Marie Domer as she piled my bounty on the scale at the produce stand on the Old Glenn Highway. It’s that earthy, almost mildewed aroma that often turns off the potential beet eater.

I’ve always loved butter-steamed beet greens, but, Dirt Diva Sally Koppenberg’s raw beet green salads at the Red Beet café are a tasty and nutritious alternative to lackluster lettuce. A particularly intriguing combination was her “White Salad” with sliced boiled and chilled new potatoes, sweet white onions, and feta cheese nestled on a bed of julienned raw beet greens. Drizzled with a tangy yogurt date dressing and a generous dusting with pungent cracked black pepper, it was heavenly. Save those leftover potatoes for tomorrow’s salad!

An easy way to enjoy root vegetables is to chunk them into a roasting pan, roll them in olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt and cracked pepper, and put them into the oven at about 350 degrees F. Bake until you can easily spear them with a fork. I like to stir them gently about halfway through the cooking to evenly brown them unless you’ve added beets, which would cause them to bleed on the other vegetables.

You can sprinkle mixed herbs on them before roasting, but, it is nice just to taste them in their natural state.

Use leftover roasted beets and potatoes to make a rich borscht soup by whizzing them up in the blender with some broth, pour into a soup pan, and add a can of diced tomatoes, a touch of red wine, some diced leftover roasted meat if you like, and some browned diced sweet onion and a touch of garlic. Serve hot with a dollop of sour cream dredged with cracked pepper.

This is guaranteed to thaw you out after you’ve planted those daffodil bulbs you bought on impulse last week!

The produce stands have had so many interesting varieties of tubers this fall from fingerlings and peanuts, purple Magic Mollies, Stampede russets, Yukon Gold, Yellow Finn, and Denali potatoes to Yellow Detroit, Ruby Queen, Bull’s Blood, and striped Chioggia beets. Each seems to have a unique texture and flavor. Local potato breeder Bill Campbell’s Magic Molly is a rich purple-fleshed waxy potato that tastes just fine cooked, chilled, and sliced thin with nothing but a sprinkling of crunchy kosher salt to top it off.

The University of Alaska’s Matanuska Experiment Farm has an “ugly Betty” unnamed variety with pink skin, protuberant fish eyes and rich tasty gold flesh. Tasters at the Palmer Potato Pageant held at the Depot Oct. 8 scarfed up those ugly unnamed tubers and declared them a success. Enquiring minds want to know when they’ll be available for our gardeners.

So, kick off your garden clogs, say goodbye to the tomato plants and get ready for winter.

Cook up a selection of jewel-toned potatoes and beets with your gardening friends and have a tuber fest. No butter or sour cream needed!

Brooke Heppinstall, artist and gardener, is the owner of Wool Wood Studio & Gardens, an art studio and nursery specializing in Alaska-grown perennials and shrubs. Visit online at Woolwood.blogspot.com.