I'll have a side of beet greens with that

This recipe takes 25 minutes and serves 2 people as a side dish.

I love beets! I eat them all the time. Look at how beautiful they are. The deep reddy purple. They currently fill the markets and I just had to do something with them. I was not sure what, but it was going to be seasonal and spectacular, and I was going to write about it.

I enthusiastically put the beetroots on to boil and went into the living room to read my book, but I forgot to turn the heat down and burnt the hell out of the beets. (Burnt beetroot is not a great smell by the way, and it hangs around for a remarkable length of time.)

So, I had to switch tack, from root to greens – which in all fairness is a too often overlooked part of the plant – and took my inspiration from the Southern US.

I went to university in New Orleans, which according to anyone in ‘the South’, is not actually 'the South'. While geographically it is right next to places like Alabama, which do count as the South, New Orleans is a different place entirely, with its own culture, language and food.

But, living in New Orleans for 4 years did let me explore other areas in the South and there are a lot of GREAT Southern foods. For me this is particularly true of breakfast foods, like grits and biscuits & gravy. Two of my favourite Southern dishes are actually sides: corn bread and collard greens.

Collard greens are a vegetable, a close relative to kale and so very similar to beet greens. The way people cook it varies quite considerably, but there is often ham involved and something acidic like lemon juice or vinegar.

I took these ingredients:

• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1/2 yellow onion
• 2 garlic cloves diced
• ½ in chilli (seeds removed)
• 2 rashers back bacon
• Greens of 5 beets rough cut (circa 4 cups) and not dried
• ¼ lemon
• 1-2 tbsp cream optional

And did this with them:

Heat the oil on a low heat and gently fry the onion on a low heat until golden. Then add the garlic, chilli and bacon until the bacon is done.  Turn the heat up to medium and add the beat greens. Cook them for about 5 minutes, until the greens are limp. Add salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze over ¼ lemon. Add 1-2 tbsp cream if you like.

The final product looked like this …

I have to say I loved both the flavour and texture of the dish. The beet greens have a much deeper flavour to them than their cousin kale. It is more robust and more metallic almost, like you can taste the iron in them (for me that’s a turn on).

The greens also have a lovely toothsome bite to them. Unlike kale, the leaves have veins in them that remain slightly harder and crunchy as the green of the leaves soften.