At night when I can’t sleep I read recipe books. I saw a recipe that included beets and thought this might be just the thing I needed to perk up my salad routine. Beets are super nutritious (iron, vitamin B-6, magnesium, potassium,  folate and manganese among other things), but I don’t cook with them that often, so I was glad to come up with this way to use them.

I used a spring mix for the greens. The way the red lettuce leaves and the red stems on the Swiss chard in the spring mix pick up the color of the beets is stunning. Nature is so beautiful! Some fresh corn and green onions pulled it all together. This is a new favorite salad.

Orange and Beet Salad

Ingredients:

1 medium beet
1 orange (or two small mandarin/clementine type oranges)
1 green onion diced
1/4 cup corn kernals
Spring mix salad greens
lime vinaigrette (or dressing of choice)

Instructions:

1. Peel and dice beet, then cook in water to cover for about 15 minutes. Drain and cool.
2. While preparing the beet, peel and segment orange, then cut up the segments.
3. Put greens, corn, green onion, oranges and beets in a bowl; dress with lime vinaigrette or salad dressing of your choice.

The beet I got at the store was fairly large (about the size of a large orange) and it made enough for two salads. I used a vegetable peeler to peel it which worked fairly well. Also, per NutritionFacts.org beets do not loose their antioxidants when cooked, so though  you can add them to the salad raw, if you prefer cooked it is no problem.

For some more reading on beets check out: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/beets/

Regarding the corn — I used corn cut from a cob of corn. Corn on the cob seems to last a long time in the fridge so I will buy a couple of ears and keep them on hand for salads, or to add to soup. I generally break the cob in half (breaking them in half is much easier than trying to cut them in half) and then cut the kernels off the half cob.