Three Winter Vegetables (Part I)

This post is part of the Cooking For People Who Don't: Food Security blog carnival.

Here are some of my standard strategies for cooking beets, cabbage, and squash. All three tend to be cheap and plentiful in the winter months. As carpenter notes, cabbages and squashes can also be huge, especially if you're only cooking for one or two people. Fortunately, they store well, so you can cut a squash or cabbage in half or quarters and use the rest later. (If you're the sort of person who likes to prepare lots of staples at once and then store them, you could also roast cubes of squash and freeze them for later.)

This post involves general notes on dealing with all three vegetables, and two specific recipes for beets (one with squash variation).

( biases and substitutions )

( shopping and preparation )

Two Beet Recipes

Beets are good with white, salty cheese. Both of the following recipes follow this principle, but you can obey it more simply by cleaning your beets and cutting them into chunks, putting them in a pan, drizzling olive oil on top, tossing it around with your hands or a spoon, adding salt, pepper, and perhaps some peeled cloves of garlic, and sticking the whole thing in the oven at 400 degrees or so, until the chunks are no longer crunchy. Eat with the white cheese of your choice (I recommend goat cheese, and maybe some walnuts).

( Greek-Style Beets )

( Roasted Beet Soup )