I have always loved beets, but I spent my pre-cooking years eat­ing them from salad bars. Sure, I knew what they looked like in the wild, I just had no idea how you did any­thing with them.

Until very recently, though, roast­ing beets was, sadly, a royal pain. I am a decent cook, I fol­low instruc­tions well, but when­ever I read a recipe for beets, I would come across a line like “and then the skins will slip right off” and I would be cov­ered in beet juice with the skins not budg­ing an inch.

Even my bible wasn’t clear­ing things up for me.

Fight­ing with your beets is espe­cially prob­lem­atic when your CSA sends you a hefty bunch every week. Last week­end, Ryan took over beet duty and made per­fect roasted beets: oven at 400, each beet scrubbed and indi­vid­u­ally wrapped in foil, oven for an hour.

And then, the skins slipped right off.

Last week we ate them with shal­lot vinai­grette and feta cheese along­side some heav­enly pulled pork. Tonight I loosely adapted Smit­ten Kitchen’s but­ter­milk dress­ing (skipped the chives, added some Pen­zeys ranch pow­der) and sliced some cel­ery for crunch. I wanted to take a photo but it was vetoed due to the some­what day-glo color combo.

Some­one was decid­edly not aware that pink and green is always in fashion.

Lilly Pulitzer Nadja dress here.