Sure fire beets recipe

I used to be scared of cooking beets. They seemed hard to do, or I just couldn't imagine how a hard, scrubby-looking vegetable from the grocery store could ever end up a delicious, tender morsel on my plate (like I'd had in restaurants) without a hell of a lot of complicated work. Looking into beet-cooking recipes, you find all kinds of painful, annoying, and painfully annoying ways to cook them, or more accurately, how to remove their skin. This turns out to be the key part of any recipe's advice.

Well, experience - plus some experimentation - finally yielded the result I was after, and without TOO much trouble. In a minute I will disclose my amazing, no-hassle recipe and process for creating tender, succulent beet morsels for your home dining pleasure (you can of course skip down if you're impatient), but first let me describe what's wrong with every OTHER recipe I tried before I landed on my magic formula.

Here's the main problem: most recipes tell you to cook them FIRST, and THEN remove the skin. There are all kinds of ways to remove piping hot skin from beets, but they all A. are difficult, B. burn your hands, or C. both. What I couldn't figure out is, isn't there a way to skin them first? Why can't we just peel them with a peeler like an apple or cucumber, and THEN cook the damn things?

So with this question in mind, I tried a brand NEW formula. You're lucky, by the way, that I'm not going to go into all the different ways one can cook a beet and THEN remove the skin, because it's tedious and (literally) painstaking. My new formula was, hey: why don't we just wash these dirty, knobby gross things, take a peeler to them, and then boil them or throw them in the oven for a while? Is there some scientific reason necessitating we keep the skin on while it's cooking?

Turns out, no. Skinning them before you cook them is the way to go. It's easy, fast, and they end up tasting delicious. Plus, when you skin a beet raw, they are the most beautiful things. Outside of course they have a dark plum sort of dirty purple color, but when you skin them raw, you see the most brilliant striations of fuchsia, pink and purple that you have ever seen! Try it, I tell you! That's all you need to know. So without further adieu, here is my recipe!

Things you will need:

Beets

Tin foil

Butter

knife

baking pan

oven

BEFORE YOU START: You can streamline your prep of this dish, I've found, by pre-tearing all your tin foil pieces (and slicing all your butter pats) before you start cutting the beets. The reason for this is that as soon as I start handling the butter and foil together, things get greasy and messy pretty quick. You don't want to be trying to tear off pieces of tin foil with buttery hands, all while handling slippery beets and a knife. Plus, everything you touch will turn purple.

- Pre-heat oven to 375- Rinse beets

-Peel beets (like with a carrot peeler) to get rough edges and skin off

- Chop beets in half

- Put a pat of butter between raw beet halves, put halves together and wrap up in small sheet of tin foil

- place wrapped beets on cookie sheet or Pyrex pan

- Put pan in oven (ideally with convection on) for 1 hour

- Remove pan from oven and let sit for 5 mins

- Carefully unwrap beets, chop into smaller pieces and serve!

Or, you could add sauteed onions, pine nuts and balsalmic vinegar, which is also tasty.
There - so I guess it wasn't THAT simple, but... pretty simple.

Hope this finds you well, and happy beet cooking!