Beet Salad with Prunes and Walnuts — Easy Holiday Recipe

Name: Beet Salad with Prunes and Walnuts — Easy Holiday Recipe
Prep time: 60 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 1 h 15 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Beets 3-4; Walnuts (shelled) 100 g; Prunes (pitted) 150 g; Homemade mayonnaise 4-5 tbsp; Salt to taste

A classic salad for a home feast: beets with prunes and walnuts. Who would have thought that a wild, bland and fibrous root could, through cultivation, turn into such a tasty and genuinely healthy vegetable? In the old days, only the greens were eaten.

As far back as 2,000 years BC, the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians used beet green juice as both food and medicine. Later, beets reached Europe, and while Europeans were still eating the greens, in Asia people had already started growing beets for their roots. Theophrastus (some 2,500 years ago) wrote of a root “thick and fleshy, pleasant and sweet to the taste.”

Beets came to our lands much later. A thousand years ago they were mentioned in the Izbornik of Sviatoslav, which is why in Kyivan Rus' beets were called “Sviatoslav's vegetable.” And once sugar was discovered in beetroot, the whole grown-up population eagerly set about turning this wonderful vegetable into an equally wonderful drink. Clearly, our ancestors valued this plant for good reason.

Let's make an excellent and, by the way, well-known salad of beets with prunes and walnuts.

Ingredients

4 servings

Beets 3-4
Walnuts (shelled) 100 g
Prunes (pitted) 150 g
Homemade mayonnaise 4-5 tbsp
Salt to taste

Step-by-step recipe

The beets need to be either boiled or baked. Usually people boil them, but in my opinion boiling takes away the flavor and makes the beets watery. Beets baked in the oven or microwave taste much better.
If you have a microwave, keep it simple. Wash the beets and trim off the tops and the tails. Pat them dry with a paper towel and pierce them right through with a knife so steam can escape while they cook. You can bake the beets in the oven until tender. In the microwave, just cook them for 15 minutes on full power, then check for doneness with a thin knife. If it goes through easily, they're done. If you feel any firmness, add 2–3 minutes at a time and test again. If the skin has started to wrinkle, the beets have been done for a while. As the moisture evaporates, beets lose up to 30% of their weight. Cooked this way, they turn out soft and sweet. Really delicious.
Let the baked beets cool naturally, at room temperature.
Carefully peel the cooled beets and grate them on the coarse side of a grater.
Toast the walnuts so they are fragrant and flavorful. This matters especially for young, freshly harvested nuts, which have a slight astringency. Here's one way to do it: soak the walnuts in cold water for 10 minutes, spread them on a heatproof plate and toast them in the oven or microwave. As soon as you smell a pleasant nutty aroma, they're ready. Let the nuts cool and break them up by hand or chop with a knife. Not too fine: roughly 8–10 pieces per walnut half. They crumble easily in your hands.
Be sure to wash the prunes and chop them coarsely.
In a deep bowl, combine the grated baked beets, walnuts and prunes. Season with salt to taste. You can also add a small clove of finely grated garlic if you like; many people do. Mix everything well and dress with homemade mayonnaise.
Transfer the beet and prune salad to a plate or salad bowl and sprinkle finely grated hard cheese on top. You can garnish it with herbs or with a prune half stuffed with a walnut.
Let the beet and prune salad rest for 15 minutes before serving, or better yet, let it chill in the fridge.
In my opinion, the tastiest beet salad with prunes and walnuts is one that has spent the night in the fridge, that is, the next day.