I'm using an appropriate font colour for this one, I think.
This is a recipe I devised on the second day of real winter in Almaty. I had spent most of the autumn there and it had been a long and glorious one. The weather was beautifully temperate and we spent long days walking around the city. There were bumper harvests of every fruit and vegetable. Tomatoes were deep red and juicy and tasted the way they did many years ago. We enjoyed several varieties of peaches; there's a flat one called 'inzhir' which means 'fig' and they're my favourite. Then the grapes began to appear: all shapes, sizes and colours. The tiny 'kishmish' are sweet-sour and seedless.
We were just beginning to enjoy the pears when the snow came. The fruit and vegetable stalls vanished and the last leaves fell from the trees. We raked around in cupboards for our winter coats, gloves, hats and boots. I went out scouring for fresh local produce and found plenty, but most of the fruit and the aubergines, tomatoes and peppers had all gone. Instead I found cabbage, onions, potatoes, beetroot, carrots and apples. Wonderful vegetables, but a sure sign of the onset of winter if ever there was one.
It was about time I did another beetroot recipe anyway, and this one involves a combination of ingredients I had been wondering about for a while. I had some blueberries in the freezer and decided the time had come to do it. The cashew nuts were a bit of an afterthought - there were a few left after making rice with olives and cashew nuts a few days earlier - but they go very nicely with the other ingredients, so I now count them as an essential part of the salad, even if I didn't include them in the title (it would have ruined the alliteration).
So, here it is. A super-food salad, guaranteed to brighten up a gray winters day.
A large cooked beetroot
A small carrot
A handful of blueberries
A handful of cashew nuts
A little fresh or dried basil and oregano
A splash olive oil
Salt
Peel the beetroot and slice it thinly. Pile the slices up and cut into sticks. Peel and grate the carrot. Chop the cashew nuts and then mix all the ingredients together.
There you have it.