Recipe: How to Make Russian Salad

Winter is a good time to use recipes that call for root vegetables. Russian salad is a great way to use up some of those veggies. It's delicious especially with roast poultry. Russian salad is generally any salad made of a mixture of cut up veggies, and sometimes meat, bound with a mayonnaise dressing. Here's the low down on the Peruvian version of it, which ALWAYS contains beets:

4 medium sized beets
4 medium sized carrots
4 medium-small potatoes (around the same size as the beets)

You need to roast or boil all the veggies until soft, but not mushy. I do the potatoes and beets in the microwave and the carrots on the stove. You can peel and cut up the carrots before cooking, then it's easier to test the texture and how done they are.

Beets - trim the tops down to about 1", then put them in an inch of water in a 2 quart casserole and stick in the microwave. It takes me about 25 minutes in my microwave. I cook ten minutes, then roll the beets over. Once they're tender (you can stick a fork in easily and the skin should be loose) put them into cold water to cool down. Once they're cool to the touch, you'll find that the tops/skins slide right off.

Cook the potatoes the same way - unpeeled. They cook much faster, of course, than the beets. Cook them 5 minutes at a time and check. Poke a few holes in the skin with a fork or knife before cooking, so they don't 'explode'. Once they're cooked, again, the skin will peel off very easily.

Once all your veggies for your Russian Salad are cooked, you want to cut up into small, bite-sized pieces.

Put your cut up veggies in a large bowl, and mix with your favorite dressing. Typically, mayonnaise is used for this. I like to make homemade dressing with mayo, milk and lemon juice. Others like with Miracle Whip. The quantity of dressing is pretty much a matter of taste, feel free to play around with it. Just start with about a cup, and if that's not enough, add a little at a time.

This is another one of those things you don't want to stir real vigorously, or you'll end up smashing your potatoes and it just won't be as pretty. The juice from the beets mixes with the dressing and gives this a lovely color that perks up a plate in winter when served on a lettuce leaf.

My mother in law adds chopped up, tender-crisp green beans to hers, and a lot of people throw in a couple handfuls of peas. Yukon golds are good potatoes for this, as they don't get mushy - you can also use new red potatoes, if they're very small, use a few extra. You want basically equal amounts of the three veggies.

Next time you're serving a roast meat, consider having a Russian salad as a side dish. It's a wonderful compliment that you're sure to enjoy.