Beet Latkes and Sugar Snap Pea Salad

After spending the past few days at home battling a cold, I was looking forward to finally cooking dinner and using some of the ingredients from our latest farmers market delivery.  We had a bunch of beautiful Chiogga beets and a bag of sugar snap peas from Siena Farms that I wanted to use.  I don't have a lot of experience cooking with beets but I typically either roast them for salads or make beet chips.  Neither of those options seemed particularly appealing to me so I did a little research and found a recipe for Cumin-Scented Beet Latkes, which sounded like a great new way of cooking beets. 

To start, I washed the Chiogga beets.  We had previously trimmed the beet greens when they were delivered last week to keep the beet greens fresh for use another time.  

Since I was still a bit groggy from my cold medicine, B offered to peel and shred the beets for me.   I think he was nervous about me handling any sharp objects!

We both marveled at how pretty the Chiogga beets were with the pink and white rings.

While B was working on the beets, I started on the sugar snap peas.

I put some water on boil in my vegetable steamer while I washed and trimmed the sugar snap peas.  When the water started boiling, I steamed the sugar snap peas for about five minutes.

During this time, I put together a simple vinaigrette for the sugar snap peas using Silverbrook Farm hot pepper jam (left over from our hot pepper bourbon glazed chicken), rice vinegar and white balsamic champagne vinegar.  The vinaigrette had nice elements of spicy, sweet and tart flavors.  

When the sugar snap peas were done steaming, I gave them a cold rinse and place them in the refrigerator to cool down.  By this time, we were ready to begin assembling our latkes.  Our beets resulted in only three cups of shredded beets once B absorbed the moisture with a paper towel so we just halved the latke recipe and combined flour, salt, cumin, coriander, baking powder, black pepper, and two eggs.  Using a quarter cup for each patty, this resulted in about eight patties.

I fried the latkes in a large skillet with vegetable oil until they were a delicious golden brown.  When the latkes were ready, I gave the now cold sugar snap peas a quick toss in the vinaigrette. 

The latkes tasted a bit sweeter than normal potato latkes but definitely had the same texture.  To be honest, the cumin flavor was a little lost on me but B claimed that he could taste it so I think this might be an effect of being a bit sick and my taste buds being a little off.  

The latkes were hearty and went well with the cold sugar snap pea salad.  I even used a bit of the vinaigrette as a sauce for my latkes.

Besides roasting beets, do you have any interesting recipes for beets that you'd like to share?