Beet & Sweet Potato Hash

This is what we had for dinner the other day. The verdict? DELICIOUS!! I love it because I love root vegetables (beet & sweet potatoes are some of my favourite parts of wintertime fooding), and also because the recipe utilizes the beet greens too, so you can buy a bunch of smallish beets and also use the greens. The second time I made this recipe I only had one large beet without any greens so I sauteed kale instead, and that also came out really good.



First, chop one sweet potato and about two (med sized) beets and roast for about 40 min with olive oil, salt & pepper. (keep them on separate sides of the pan so the potatoes don't get stained.) Cook a cup of quinoa (half a cup of dry quinoa to one cup water) & poach the eggs (one per plate), then thinly slice the beet greens (or whatever greens you're using) and saute in oil with salt & pepper. Chop a leek, add that, and saute until everything's cooked. Then throw in the roasted root veggies and quinoa and stir, then put a serving on each plate (between the two of us, we finish this off every time but it would be easy to do three smaller portions with something else on the side) and top each plate with a poached egg and a sprinkle of pepper.

This was my first time poaching eggs! Since watching the Julie & Julia movie (I wouldn't recommend it; Amy Adams as Julie is insufferable) I've been wanting to eat EVERYTHING with BUTTER, and I was intimidated by the thought of poaching eggs, but it's ridiculously simple. You bring the water to a boil, then add a tablespoon of vinegar and reduce the heat so it's not rolling so much. Then crack each egg in to a teacup or measuring cup, so that you can immerse something in to the water and slide it out slowly, rather than just cracking the egg and dropping it in to hot water. So easy! Cook it in the simmering water for about thee minutes depending on how goopy you want the yolk to be (goopy egg yolks used to gross me out, but if you're eating good eggs they're actually pretty delicious--just sop them up with something). Three minutes gets the white cooked firmly and the yolk still goopy, and cooking it for longer starts to solidify the yolk which I think is gross.

I also did this recipe with a scrambled egg on top of each plate instead, and I liked it slightly more. The scrambled egg is nice and mild and took away from some of the saltiness, but J loves poached eggs, so we've done it both ways. Delicious either way & definitely lacking without. Yum!!