Ingredients:
1 tablespoon butter
1 onion, chopped
5 medium beets, boiled (or roasted) and peeled
juice 1/2 lemon
2 1/2 teaspoons sugar
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Directions:
Saute onion in the butter until soft and translucent. Shred the beets and add to the onion. Saute briefly to coat the beets in the onions. Remove to a bowl and add the remaining ingredients. Toss to coat. Serve warm or refrigerate 2 hours to overnight and serve cold.

My thoughts:

Continuing on our theme of Eastern European-inspired side dishes, I present the beet salad. I swear, every Polish cookbook, novel, blog and magazine I read during the planning for this year’s Thanksgiving had at least 2 recipes for beet salad or at least, a character eating beet salad. I’ve never been to Poland but if I ever get there, I plan to eat beet salad as soon as I deplane. I kept it simple for this salad, just beets, lemons and onion but it is very, very good. Very beet-y but not earthy beet-y, more sweet, fresh vegetable beet-y.

I saw recipes for beet salad that had you shred raw beets then cook them but honestly, that makes no sense to me. Beets are super easy to peel once cooked; the skin just slides off when you run them with a paper towel (no red hands!). The final texture of the dish is the same if you cook the beets before or after so why not save yourself some hassle.

Another bonus to this recipe? If you want to serve it cold (I did) you can make it the day before and just whip it out when dinner is served. One less thing to worry about.