Garden Harvest: Roasted Beets

Beets are not my favorite vegetables.  They are edible however, and are supposed to be very good for you.  SO...when I was given a bunch of beets, I decided to roast some of them.  In the back of my mind I remember making some wonderful roasted beets many years ago when dear friends asked us to use their CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) shares when they were going to be gone for half the summer.  That particular CSA hostess often included recipes, especially for vegetables that were lesser well-known.  She gave us a recipe for roasted beets, roasted in the (well-scrubbed) skins.  They were so very good.  Just not good enough for me to plant beets in our garden yet.  If I find the recipe and it still is as good as I remember, perhaps beets will be in the garden next year.

This is what I did with the beets:

Scrubbed 5 large beets.  Cut off the tops and the root ends.  Cut the beets in half then sliced into 1/2 inch slices then sliced the other direction as well.

Put the beet chunks in a 3-quart bowl.

Beets in 3-quart bowl

Added to the bowl:
3 Tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Mixed all this together well (I used my hands, but you could use a rubber spatula or long-handled wooden spoon.  I enjoyed licking the salt-pepper-and-thyme-y goodness off my fingers.)

Preheated the oven to 400 degrees F.

Beets on pan and ready to roast

Put the prepared beets on a large rimmed baking pan, in this case a half-sheet pan.  Spread the beets around so they were in one layer.  Cooked for 30 minutes.  Removed from oven and stirred well then returned to oven for another 30 minutes of cooking.  Removed from oven again and let sit a few minutes to cool.

Roasted beets cooling

They were more than edible!  Not fantastic as in feeling like I had died-and-gone-to-Heaven good, but very much eat-able.  Based on how these taste, I may try to turn some of them into borscht soup.  My last effort in the borscht department was such a disaster taste-wise that I thought I would never make it again.  Just today I saw a recipe that looks really good.  It uses sauercraut!  What can go wrong with sauercraut?!