Easy to scale up or down, this Beet and Feta Salad recipe has three distinct elements—the beets, the veggies, and the feta and nut garnish—that make it instantly enticing.
This recipe requires a bit of planning, but don’t let that stop you from making it. If you start this the night before, you can roast the pumpkin seeds while the beets are roasting and set them aside (with a full load of nuts, you can smuggle a snack with no guilt!). I felt the roasting time was overly optimistic unless you had tiny, tender beets (after an hour my medium-sized beets were still fairly firm and also had more work to peel, so I’d allow over an hour for roasting).
The suggested marinating time for the beets is 2-12 hours, but at 14-15 hours that didn’t suffer one bit, and since my 1/2 portion of beets was still more than I needed for 2 people, I saved the 1/2 liter of beet wedges with the marinade I reserved and brought them back to marinate a little more gently until another meal.
Since watercress wasn’t readily available, I used wild arugula (arugula) for a similarly peppery note. “Nice mȃche” would also work beautifully. Wash and spin the used greens as thoroughly as possible.
The salad dressing is a nice balance and blends beautifully in the blender. However, if it’s been in the fridge overnight, you’ll need to shake it up. I needn’t have worried that the raw onions would dominate – they were well balanced and the slight sweetness harmonized with the peppery greens and earthy beets.
I roasted the beets separately to preserve the color, but since the marinade wasn’t great I wasn’t sure if dividing the marinade would work, so I decided to skip the art work and marinate both the red and golden beets together, and accept the color bleeding as part of the charm.