This Pickled Beet Carpaccio with Feta celebrates the beauty of seasonal produce. It’s a beautiful fresh summer salad that is can be enjoyed on its own or with some slices of nut or olive bread. Pickling is a great way to ‘cook’ your vegetables while preserving most of the nutrients in the vegetables. Pickled vegetables are also more easily digested than raw vegetables and are a great way to eat ‘raw’ when you have issues digesting raw food. I love the versatility of pickling vegetables. You can use spices, herbs and different kinds of vinegars to create your own flavour. Pickling vegetables is easy and pickled vegetables can add some punch, crunch and color to an otherwise bland green salad. This Pickled Beet Carpaccio with Feta is all about the beauty of the fresh beets. The sweet and sour beets offer a nice contrast to the sharp, salty flavour of the goat’s feta. The pomegranates add a lovely freshness and I just love how the pomegranates juices blend in nicely into the rest of the salad. Enjoy this simple, and simply perfect, summer salad!

Ingredients

• 2 Chioggia (red and white striped) beets
• 2 Golden (yellow) beets
• ¼ cup of Greek Thyme honey
• ½ cup (125ml) of pomegranate vinegar
• ½ pomegranate, seeds
• 1 tsp of fresh thyme
• 1 tbsp of fresh mint
• ½ cup of goat’s feta
• sea salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• extra virgin olive oil to sprinkle on top

 Instructions

• Rinse and rub the root vegetables clean in cool running water. I kept the skin on of the red beets because it was shiny and beautiful but peeled the skin off the golden because it was rough and crumpled.
• Use a food processor to make beautiful thin, almost translucent slices of the beets. Do the yellow one first and place them in a separate bowl. You don’t want the red color of the red beets to bleed through the bright yellow slices. Slice the red beets and add them to another bowl.
• For the pickle, mix the honey and vinegar in a small bowl. Add half of the mixture to each of the bowls with the beets and mix in well. Cover the bowls with a plate and allow the beets to ‘cook’ in the juices for at least an hour. You can also make them the day before and pickle them overnight.
• Cut the pomegranate in half. Hold it over a bowl and use the back of a wooden spoon on the skin part of the fruit to knock out the seeds. Make sure to remove any white skin, as it’s quite bitter.
• To serve, use a big plate and start making layers with the yellow beet slices around the outside of the plate. Use red beets for the inner circles making sure to prevent the color of the red beets from running into yellow beets.
• Crumble the goat’s feta using your hands right above the center of the plate. Sprinkle the pomegranate seeds on top and the fresh thyme and mint. Generously drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil and season with freshly squeezed black pepper and sea salt.