The lurid gorgeousness of a beet-enhanced meal

This was super tasty, and composed spontaneously from Stuff We Had Around. If you were going to do it on purpose, you could do it something like this:

Stuff (aka ingredients):

• A bunch of collard greens
• Some fresh basil
• 8 ounces of sliced turkey (I bet it would work great with tofu or tempeh if you wanted to make it vegetarian)
• A tomato
• About a cup of cooked barley (We like to cook it in broth instead of water)
• Half an onion
• A little broth or water
• 3 or 4 cloves of garlic
• 3 large beets
• Olive oil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Wash the beets and cut the ends off, then put them on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Drizzle with olive oil. Make a little tent of the tinfoil so the beets are covered. Put in oven.

While the beets cook, chop the onion and garlic, mince the sliced turkey (or other protein source), and tear the collard greens & basil into bite-sized pieces. Also cut up the tomato.

I recommend a wok for putting everything together, but you can just use a large pan if you’re not wok-enabled.

Heat some olive oil in the wok or other pan. Saute the onion & garlic until the onion is softened, then add the turkey, then the collard greens & basil, then the tomato, then the cooked barley. If it looks like there’s not enough liquid, add a little broth or water.

Probably the beets won’t be done yet, but you can check them now. Peel back the foil tent and poke at them. (Done basically = not too crunchy.)

If the beets aren’t done, don’t worry. Just turn the heat off on the wok and wait a while.

When the beets are done, cut them up and toss them with the other ingredients. Everything will become lurid. And delicious.