So farmer's market mark II gave me an even larger plethora of food, including a big bunch of yellow beets. I love beets. Beets are my friends. Also, yellow beets taste just as great as red ones, yet do not threaten to turn the entire kitchen red. BEETS!!

Ahem. Yes. So I washed and scrubbed four beets, pricked them all over with a fork, rubbed them with a little olive oil, sealed them up in a tinfoil packet, and threw them into a 350F oven. After about a half hour, I realized they were dripping hot juice onto the oven floor and rushed to throw a cookie sheet underneath. Mental note: just put the packet on a cookie sheet in the first place next time.

After about 45 minutes, my beets were tender and delicious. I took them out of the oven and opened the packet to let them cool down a bit. Then it was time to skin them. To skin cooked beets, just squeeze them. The skins (and even the stems) come off really easily. At this point my beets looked like so:

Right! I just had to figure out what to do with them.

Ok, well, beets love to be pickled, but I was definitely not up for waiting around at that time. Of course, I do have to find a quick refrigerator pickle recipe for the rest of the bunch of beets, and possibly for all the rest of the beets I buy over the entire summer. Anyway. I had green beans in the veg drawer, so I decided to chop them up, steam them for a couple minutes, and make a salad.

Voila: beans, beets, salt, and pepper.

So I could have eaten this with some variation on vinaigrette dressing. Normal vinaigrette would be good; very mustardy dijon vinaigrette would be good. In fact, that would have been pretty great; the idea is making me hungry right now. Well, I was hungry anyway, since it is currently 7 pm on Friday night and I haven't eaten anything since lunch. Beet and green bean with vinaigrette would still be exceptionally good.

However, since I was looking for a full lunch, I wanted my beets and green beans with labneh. This is just yogurt cheese: plain yogurt with the whey drained out. If you've had thick Greek yogurt, you've had something rapidly approaching labneh. Usually I make my own, using a very fine nylon mesh strainer; this time, however, I had recently discovered the Lebanese market up the street from our apartment, and therein also discovered not just excellent pita and kabobs but also massive one-pound containers of labneh. Yes. I whacked a spoonful of labneh over my salad, made a huge mess mixing it up, and ate it all.