One lunchtime in Kazakhstan, I visited a shop that sells ready-made salads, sandwiches and pies. I wanted something quick for my lunch, but most of the things had meat in them. I was about to give up searching when I came across the 'diet' shelf. Almost everything was vegetarian. I got a couple of steamed vegetable cutlets, a portion of mashed potato and a portion of beetroot and apple salad. Altogether, it made a delicious lunch. It's a pity that most people in Central Asia seem to think that a vegetarian diet is a temporary thing for when you want to loose weight or you are unlucky enough to be too ill to eat meat.
Once, when I was flying to Uzbekistan, I started chatting to my neighbour. He was rather talkative and he told me he was a professor at a university in Tashkent. It transpired that we had actually met two or three years before, when I had some business with someone else at that university, but we only discovered this after we got talking. We arranged to meet in Tashkent for dinner and maybe to go to the theatre and I mentioned that I was vegetarian. He was very surprised. He said he had met several women who were vegetarian, but I was the first man. He then looked me up and down and asked, 'Why do you need to be vegetarian?'
You might think this is one of the easiest recipes in my cookbook, but there are even easier ones.
If you're starting with raw beetroot and you're not sure how to cook it, have a look here.
Ingredients
2 cooked beetroots
1 apple
Peel everything. Grate everything. Mix everything together.