And now for a change of theme – we tried something different for dinner last night – Beetroot Carpaccio.

The genesis of this was that when we were in Harrietville for a few days  at the end of summer we went out for dinner at the Poplars restaurant in Bright.

We shared a starter – the aforementioned beetroot carpaccio, and thought that’s rather good we can do this ourselves, not realising that there was a recipe out there and the carpaccio was not just something invented by the restaurant.

We had a couple of false starts – bought the beetroot, used it for something else, forgot about it etc, but on Saturday we managed to buy both the beetroot and some firmish goat cheese at the same time.

To make the carpaccio we:

• topped tailed and sliced a beetroot thinly
• marinaded it in a mixture of one quarter balsamic / three quarters white wine vinegar
• after twenty minutes realised that wasn’t going to quite work so zapped the beetroot plus vinegar in the microwave for a minute
• let the beetroot (still in the marinade) cool
• once cool lay on a plate, dress with 10c coin sized bits of goat cheese and a good quality olive oil
• garnish with a salad of endive, radicchio and lettuce (or use a good mesculun salad mix)
• serve, along with some greek style lamb sausage
• enjoy

and pretty good it was too!