Pink Food

In recent weeks, there has been a theme to the food I have cooked: it’s all pink. This is not intentional (unless it’s unconscious obedience to my godsister’s instruction to ‘embrace the pink’), but it has yielded some surprisingly good results.
In fact of course it’s just due to a surplus of two seasonal ingredients, rhubarb and beetroot. The rhubarb I have covered in sufficient detail elsewhere (although at some point I should tell you about the rhubarb ice-cream that was the highlight of the dessert menu at tapas restaurant Salt Yard), but the beetroot deserves a bit of attention.
In their first incarnation, the beetroot were just little dusty balls of muddy red, piled into a nasty plastic bag by their onlie begetter at the Marylebone Farmers’ Market. Normally I like talking to producers and am grateful for their advice on how to prepare their goods, but this woman was so monomaniacally firm about how I ought to roast the beetroot that I rebelled.
Carefully donning rubber gloves (I believe Lady Macbeth's problem was just that she had forgotten to do this before dealing with the crimson root vegetable), I peeled the little dears and grated them before mixing them with crème fraiche, a little bit of olive oil and lemon juice and some caraway, cumin and fennel seed, toasted and slightly crushed. This simple but intensely pink salad was so successful that one initially dubious diner offered to send photos of herself, Before and After, to the Beetroot Appreciation Society.
Cheered by this success, I improvised further. Inspired by the find of a half-price smoked chicken breast, I decided that what my life needed was smoked chicken and beetroot risotto.

Smoked chicken and beetroot risotto for 3
75g butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ onion, finely chopped
250g risotto rice (arborio, carnaroli, etc au choix)
1 glass white wine
some hot stock (I’ve never measured the amount of stock in a risotto, I just keep adding till it seems like the right texture and the rice is done)
4 baby beetroots, boiled, peeled and chopped into 2cm dice
1 smoked chicken breast, sliced
100g smoked Gubbeen cheese, grated
fresh chopped chives to garnish

Melt 50g butter in a heavy-based saucepan and gently fry the garlic and onion until soft. Add the rice and stir until it turns translucent. Add the wine and stir until it is all absorbed. Add the hot stock ladle by ladle, stirring gently each time until it is all absorbed. When the rice is almost cooked (in about 20 minutes) add the beetroot and chicken. When it is done to your taste (more or less al dente, more or less liquid), remove from the heat and stir in the remaining butter, cheese and chives. Season to taste.

When this recipe occurred to me, I pictured it the usual creamy white of risotto with pink splodges where the beetroot pieces speckled it. Instead it turned a wonderful, uniform Barbie pink, a colour that only a four-year-old girl could love, which is why the chives are so necessary to relieve the plastic colour.
The final incarnation of the beetroot (the woman who wanted them roasted obviously thought that I needed more pink in my life, and by golly she made sure I got it) was in a spinach salad with croutons and a delicious sheep’s milk yoghurt dressing. Delicious it may have been but the pernicious pinkness invaded it, clashing horribly with the red stalks of the baby spinach leaves. The man to whom I served this blenched at being asked to eat something so unmasculine, but to his credit only murmured a suggestion about adding the croutons last ‘so that they would look like something you’re supposed to eat’. I suppose if you had a nasty imagination, the soggy, ragged, dark pink lumps could be thought to resemble gobbets of raw flesh.
The final two baby beetroots – can you believe I haven’t come to the end of it? – sat in the fridge in their boiled state, developing some of the most exciting moulds I have ever seen outside a cheese cellar.

The beetroot madness may be over, but I have just found a recipe (in The Silver Spoon) for chicken in pink sauce. Can I, should I resist?