Buttery Spiralized Beets

I’ve admitted I come late to being a fan of beets.  I thought they tasted too much like dirt.  (How do I know how dirt tastes?  It’s called ‘childhood’).  My favorite way to eat beets is to wrap each one in foil and grill it.  Then use the foil to rub the skins off, slice and eat.  You could add butter, but not necessary.  The grilling gives them an extra layer of flavor that is not found in simple roasting.  They taste… grilled!

One windy day my P.S. (Personal Searer)  decided he didn’t want to fight to keep the grill going.  I needed to come up with alternative plans for our dinner.  I’d made sausage and vegetable skewers (to be posted at another time) and planned a beet side dish.  My daughter had given me some spiralized beets and hadn’t sent me the recipe we wanted to try.  I knew the beets needed to be eaten as their use by date was going to happen soon.  Since I had to heat the oven to roast the skewers, roasting was the best way to optimize the flavor of the pretty spirals as well.

Place beets in a baking dish with 1/2″ of water. The beets will cook down, you don’t need a huge dish.

I placed the beet spirals in a small baking dish with a half inch of water, salted and peppered them and put them into a 375°F oven.  I set the timer for 20 minutes.  I wanted to test them to see how they were progressing.  I didn’t want the beets to mush out, but I had no idea how long a beet “noodle” would take to be fork tender.

Roast beets for 20 minutes. Stir, add butter and return to oven for 20 more minutes.

At 20 minutes the beets were still firm and I stirred them to coat them all with the water again.  I added 3 tablespoons of butter and slid the dish back into the oven for another 20 minutes.

Stir and serve hot

After 40 minutes of cooking the beets were done just right.  I stirred them again before serving to make sure they were all coated with butter.

The beets were SO good!  A simple roasting with butter was almost as good as grilling the beets.  As we ate dinner I jokingly told my P.S. I was going to call the spiralized beets “boodles”.  They call spiral zucchini “zoodles”, why not give the beets their own new name?  My P.S. just frowned at me in that way that says “yeah, whatever” and continued eating.

Buttery Spiralized Beets

I did some research and found the most famous Boodles to be a British gin.  Uh oh, boodles might not be a good thing to try to name the spiralized beets.  But now that you mention it, I do love gin and might make a trip to a local liquor store to see if I can find some…