I tend to make pretty chunky borsch – I like the smooth kind served cold with a bit of vinegar stirred in, but I also like a big hearty soup with pieces of beet and potato and beef and plenty of cabbage, and that’s the sort we usually have at home. I usually use beef or lamb broth for the base, if I have any, and dill as the main seasoning. And sour cream on top, of course.

This particular batch had a slightly different flavor than usual, as I braised the beef in beer before assembling the rest of the soup, instead of using broth. A friend brought a growler of excellent locally-brewed stout to our holiday party this weekend, and I wanted to use some of it up. I seared the beef stew meat with onions, added a cup of stout, and let it simmer covered for an hour and a half while I roasted the beets and sliced the cabbage. I topped up the soup pot with a little water and added everything else, then let it cook another half hour or so. It was a really good borsch, and the beer made it less sweet and a bit earthier. A slice of buttered rye bread would have been the only thing to make it better.

Posting that chicken chiffon pie really took a lot out of me, but I think I’m in recovery. Now we can move on to better, and yummier, things. Like horseradish cream.

I just discovered this easy sauce on Friday – I had gotten a tenderloin out of the freezer for dinner, and was trying to figure out what to cook alongside. I pulled out Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques, which is helpfully arranged both by season and by menu, and found a suggestion of roasted beets with horseradish creme fraiche. We bought some enormous beets recently at the farmer’s market, so that was an easy call, and the sauce sounded fantastic. I walked down to the co-op and picked up a container of creme fraiche. I’ve made this myself in the past, but it takes time to culture so this time I took the easy route. And all I had to do was stir in a heaping spoonful of prepared horseradish and some salt and pepper (Goin adds a few other seasonings, but it didn’t seem necessary). It was SO GOOD with the beets, which we cubed and roasted in olive oil and herbed salt, as well as the steak and the steamed broccolini. And it was good the next morning with latkes, and eaten cold that night stirred into leftover beets. And the tiny bit that’s left is fated to be drizzled over tonight’s beef stew with barley and mushrooms. I’m looking forward to it.

So you may recall that last week there was a dish specifically designed to use up beet greens, but the beets themselves never made an appearance. Here they are! I deeply regret not taking a picture of them while they were fresh and intact, because they were beautiful – but you’ll just have to cope with pictures of the finished product, a gratin of beets, potatoes, and cheese. The beets were from Blue Heron Farm, and the potatoes from Frog’s Song Farm. The cheese was from the supermarket (sorry, the local cheesemaker doesn’t do Gruyère-style).

This is based on an actual recipe from one of our old standbys, the The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook. It calls for specific quantities and measurements, of course, but I never have the exact amounts of anything so I end up just tossing stuff in however. The key is adding plenty of cheese and cream.

Basic method for building a potato-beet gratin:

Take whole potatoes and beets, about 3 pounds total – any proportion works. Put the potatoes in one pot and the beets in another. Cover with water and simmer until just tender. Slip the skins off under cold running water, slice thinly and set aside.

Grate a nice big pile of Gruyère or Emmental cheese – the more the merrier. Chop a little fresh rosemary. Butter a casserole dish and put in a layer of beets. Sprinkle with cheese, some rosemary, salt and pepper. Add a layer of potatoes and repeat, alternating beets and potatoes. Continue until the pan is full or you run out of everything. Coat the top with breadcrumbs, dot with butter and pour a cup of cream over the top (really, it needs to be at least a cup – shut your eyes if necessary). Bake at 350° until hot, bubbly and crispy on top.

Excellent eaten immediately, but makes a great leftover, especially for breakfast with a fried egg (I know, I say that about everything, but it’s true!)

This past month we’ve been trying something new – Bikram yoga. Two or three times a week we voluntarily put ourselves in a very hot room and twist ourselves into postures that leave us unbelievably sore, with a tendency to sleep ten hours a night (not that we generally get to). The drawback (for those of us obsessed with food) is that you can’t come home after nine hours of work and 90 minutes of hot yoga and expect to have time or digestive power for an exciting, complex or heavy dinner. Or alcohol. As a result, we’ve been expanding our repertoire of fried rices and other things that can be processed in the morning, then dumped in a hot wok and promptly inhaled alongside a pot of green tea. A few pounds have been lost, let me tell you.

This dish is a nice alternative to a straight stir fry or fried rice. I first got the idea from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, in which she admits her fondness for an enormous plate of buckwheat soba mixed with wilted beet greens. I don’t think I would have ever tried it, except that we often seem to have leftover beet greens in the house and I was feeling desperate one day for something besides bean soup to use them in. We discovered that we absolutely love the combination – the earthy greens with the equally earthy buckwheat noodles are amazingly good together – and we also discovered that sea scallops make a great topping. Now it’s one of our favorite quick lunches when we’ve bought beets at the farmer’s market. And it makes a great after-yoga meal: fast, fun and actually good for you!

Buckwheat soba with beet greens and scallops

serves two

• two bundles buckwheat soba
• canola oil
• one bunch beet greens, well washed and roughly chopped
• a spoonful of soy sauce
• a drizzle of rice vinegar
• 1/2 pound sea scallops, patted dry and lightly salted

Bring a large saucepan full of water to the boil; add the soba and cook until just done, about 5 minutes (check the cooking instructions on the package, they vary a lot). Drain, rinse with cold water and set aside.

Heat a wok over the highest possible heat. Swirl some oil into the wok, then add the beet greens. Make sure nobody in the room has a cat on their lap – they tend to panic at the resulting explosion. Stirfry the greens until completely wilted, then add the noodles. Season with the soy sauce and rice vinegar, toss thoroughly, and turn off the heat.

In a medium nonstick skillet, heat a drizzle of oil over med-high heat. Add the scallops and leave alone for a minute, then flip with tongs to brown the reverse side. I like my scallops a bit rare, but follow your own taste.

Pile noodles and greens on plates, top with scallops, eat.

It seems like this has become such a hackneyed combination of late – in the past year it seemed like every restaurant we’ve visited has had a beet/goat cheese salad on their menu. But you know what? That’s because the flavors are PERFECT together.

Oddly enough, though, I don’t think I had ever combined them at home. We eat beets fairly frequently, since I discovered the glory of roasting them in olive oil until they get soft and caramelized, but we usually just eat them straight and blazingly hot, or mix them with other roasted vegetables. I also once made a beet salad from the The Zuni Cafe Cookbook where they were marinated in black currant vinegar and mixed gently with walnuts and watercress, but somehow beet salad never made it into the regular home repertoire.

A few days ago, though, I was shopping for something to go with a steak from our freezer, and I noticed bunches of baby beets from one of the local farms. As I was picking out a bunch, I suddenly remembered the half-round of Bucherondin chevre lurking in our fridge – we had eaten some of it along with good bread and the shrimp gratin earlier in the week, but then run out of bread – and it’s much too good of a cheese to allow to spoil. So I picked up a head of redleaf lettuce as well, hauled my goodies up the hill and plopped the beets into a pan of water to simmer. Once they were fork-tender, I ran cold water over them and slipped the skins off, cut up the beets into thick slices and drizzled a little walnut oil over them. The chevre I cut into small chunks, which went into the bowl with the beets. Then I tossed the lettuce with a dressing of olive oil, Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar, and took it all to the table so we could compose our own salads.

It was a thing of beauty alongside the steak, with an Oregon Bordeaux-style wine (Cana’s Feast Bricco Two Rivers – delicious) and a good pan sauce. Why don’t I do this more often?

Saturday night’s dinner was pretty exciting (and filling), so I made us a “recovery” dinner for Sunday, just a fillet of wild-caught sockeye salmon, pan-seared in olive oil, and a head of fennel and some beets, cut up and roasted in the oven. It was beautiful, fresh tasting and sweet, and it turns out that salmon and fennel are really good together (note for future experiments).

Of course, we may have undone some of the good of this dinner by also baking up the rest of the gougères and eating them all. Whoops.