Beet Green Gratin 

This weeks random recipe landed me on page 30 of Good Eats 2: The Middle Years and the episode dealing with beets. I had never really eaten beets before and I was not all that keen on it. I think beets have got a bad rap over the years. The chapter offered to recipes: one for pickled beets and one for a dish with beet greens. Since I didn't want to wait a whole week for the beets to become pickles I opted for the less adventurous beet green dish.

So what is a gratin? I asked myself the same question. It sounds pretty fancy but it is really a very simple technique that is common to many dishes. All a gratin is is some kind of toasted crust on the top of a casserole like dish. If the crust is made of bread crumbs (usually buttered), cheese or in this recipes case, Ritz crackers, they all fall under the gratin category. The macaroni from the last entry could also be classified as a gratin. So that's the meaning behind the fancy name but it doesn't really say much about the actual dish. Basically it was just a quiche, without a crust. Eggs, some cheese, mushrooms and the beet greens all baked in the oven, nothing to complicated. I will say that the beet greens, which were Swiss chard by the way, were not my favourite green. I would have much preferred spinach for this application. I think the Swiss chard was a little too earthy for my liking. I'm not really sure what "earthy" really means but they throw it around on the food network all the time. Does it mean that earthy foods taste like dirt? Not really sure but I think it fits with the Swiss chard's flavour (I'm not saying they taste like dirt though). Now that we are all throughly confused, try out this dish and see if you can describe Swiss chard's flavour better.


Recipe: Beet Green Gratin