Beet, Feta and Pine Nut Salad

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, on eHow.com, and today I'm showing you how to make a roasted beet salad with pine nuts and goat cheese. So let's get started. I'm going to add some nuts to my salad. I have pine nuts here but you can use any nuts you like. I'm going to toast these just a little bit over low heat and you could use almonds if you have them. You could use hazelnuts, walnuts, anything would be great but the nuts are going to add a little bit of fat to the salad. Now next I'm going to make a vinaigrette. I'm starting out with shallots this is what they look like when they're in their skin and shallots are a kind of onion. They're a little bit sweeter than a regular white onion but they've got a little bit more of a complex flavor and they're a wonderful foundation for any salad dressing. So I'm just going to mince these up. So I'm going to put them in my salad bowl with my olive oil and vinegar and let them kind of mellow out in the dressing. This is going to help their flavor to develop and help them to not be quite so oniony. So these go in first, then I'm going to add a little bit of red wine vinegar and you can use any vinegar that you have around, white wine vinegar would be great in this, balsamic is wonderful with red beets but I've got red wine so that's what I'm using and olive oil is my favorite oil for a salad dressing. So I'm generous with that. I'm going to also add some salt which is going to help these onions kind of start to break down and mellow their flavor. Okay, so meanwhile, I've got my nuts toasting and these are looking a little bit brown so that's all I want. The heat just helps to bring out their flavor, helps to bring out the oils in the nuts and that's all you need. These don't need to be super toasty. So I'm taking these off the heat and letting these cool. So now that I've got my dressing going I'm going to cut out some beets. These are some beets that I've roasted yesterday in their skins. Once they came out of the oven and cooled off I just pulled off the skins with my fingers. So I'm going to show you a little trick before I start cutting up my beets. I'm going to put some olive oil on my cutting board and this is going to give it a protective coating so that the beet juice doesn't stain the board. Isn't that cool? Okay, so here are my beets and I'm just going to coarsely chop these into roughly bite size pieces and you can see these are really tender. They're really sweet and cooking beets in their skins is a great way to cook them because it really locks in their flavor and it's also a lot neater than first peeling them and then cutting them because that's a definite recipe for getting beet juice all over the place. So I like to throw the beets right into the vinaigrette first off so they can really soak up all this good flavor from the vinegar and the oil and the shallots and this already looks really beautiful. Beets are such a great choice for Fall meals because they just look gorgeous. So I'm going to let that do its thing. Now I'm going to add some fresh greens. These are just a selection of baby greens. You could use any lettuce that you like with this salad, Romaine would be good. You could even use leafy greens like kale or collards if they were cut up small that would be fine. So I'm putting those in there. I also have some fresh herbs. I have some tarragon which is in the licorice family. So this is going to give it a little bit of a flavor boost and I'm just going to tear up the tarragon leaves and throw them in. Now you could use mint in there, thyme would be great, oregano, basil would also be good, even some sage for Fall, any herb you like and you could even use dried herbs if you don't have fresh. So I've got everything in here, last but not least I'm going to add a little bit of fat and flavor to my salad with some crumbled goat cheese. So this is really beautiful. The reason that I'm adding cheese to this salad is that the fat in the cheese really is going to bring out all the flavors of the dish. This is a very very healthy salad but you don't want it to taste too healthy. That's why we have the cheese in there. So this is looking really good. I'm going to put some pepper in here. It kind of gives it a little bit of spiciness, a little bit of warmth which is nice for cold weather meals and some salt and this is ready to go. Last thing I'm going to do is put a few of these toasted pine nuts on top. Ah, this looks so warming for Fall. So here we go. So this is a healthy and delicious salad that looks really elegant and looks really festive with all these red colors. Let's put a few of these bright red beets on top. There you go, a simple roasted beet salad for Fall, really beautiful, really fresh and really healthy. I hope you'll try it at home. I'm Louisa Shafia. See you next time on eHow.com.