Today I woke up and had this insatiable desire to make lots and lots of food. Sometimes I work so hard in my Raw Melissa kitchen, I forget how much I enjoy spending time in my OWN kitchen at home. Thanks to some wonderful volunteers at the commercial kitchen, though, I’m a bit freed up these days to cook again in the comfort of my own home and have also been able to test recipes for my new dessert cookbook.

Today I made German Pancakes (because I had about a hundred eggs that needed to be used), Lentil Stew (heartier than soup because it SNOWED today!) and Roasted Golden Beets with Caramelized Sweet Peppers (boy oh boy was that delicious). I also cooked 30 pre made, uncooked tortillas over the open flame of my gas stove with the intention of filling them with refried beans and freezing them for “homemade frozen burritos” as well as dicing up apples with cinnamon and maple syrup for apple crisp, but I got tired and decided to go read about food on food blogs instead. I think after this post, I’ll go finish those last two tasks, but I’ll tell you, in the meantime, it’s wonderful sitting here typing with all those smells coming from my kitchen. Inspiring really.

So as I said, the Roasted Golden Beets with the Caramelized Sweet Peppers was divine. I think it was the sheer level of no less than ten flavor elements that just made this dish explode with excitement for me. So I’d love to share it with you:

Roasted Golden Beets with Caramelized Sweet Peppers

3 golden beets, peeled and coarsely and rustically chopped

2 mandarin oranges, sliced in half

3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped into bits (no need to mince)

olive oil

salt

tarragon

Put the first three ingredients in a shallow glass baking dish and toss with a nice drizzling of olive oil, a sprinkling of salt and tarragon (as if you were salting and seasoning a dish you were about to eat). Squeeze the juices out of one of the mandarins into the dish. Toss this all together, cover the dish and put in a 400 degree oven. Let roast until the beets are tender. Stir a couple of times during roasting to get flavors to meld.

Meanwhile, put the following in a sauté pan:

1 yellow pepper, sliced lengthwise very thinly

1/8 red pepper, sliced lengthwise very thinly

1/8 orange pepper, sliced lengthwise very thinly

a sprinkling of ground annatto (similar to paprika but with a more musky flavor)

a generous sprinkling of salt

a drizzle of olive oil

Saute on high heat just to get the peppers sweating and then turn down the flame to low. Let the peppers cook, stirring often, until they are very wilted and start to get a brown caramel color blush. Set them aside while the beets finish cooking.

When beets are done, toss them with the peppers, keeping the mandarins (which will now have a bit of char on their skin and tops) in the mix. Mound up on a plate, squeeze a little more juice  from one of the mandarins over the top and serve right away.

Tarragon and ground annatto are not an herb and spice that are typically seen together, but they work in this dish. Add in the roasted mandarins and the fruity flavors of the colored peppers and the golden beets, and you can’t go wrong.