Make beetroot your new superfood

Like most people, I simply can’t imagine a life without little pleasures such as chocolate or fried food, so to balance out the 10 per cent of the time when not-so-good-for-me items are consumed in quantity, like when I am on holiday, or those times when nothing but a dessert will do, I try to pack in the nutrients wherever I can.

In my house anyway, this means a focus on fairly simple meals and snacks that are dense not just in vitamins and minerals but also in flavour. Yes, taste ranks pretty highly, mainly because I’ve found that smugly quoting facts about nutritional content will not win me many (or any) brownie points at the dinner table.

It can take time to introduce new flavours and textures to your weekly menu. Training your palate is a process, especially if your diet has been high in processed foods full of sugar, fat and salt, as few foods can match the brain’s appetite for these substances; they send our pleasure receptors haywire. Really, then, you’re retraining your brain as much as your palate.

So if you want to improve your diet over the long term, the best approach can be to take something that is regularly eaten and fairly popular and pair it with an ingredient that might be less familiar. A certain reassurance comes from eating something you know and love, even when it is cooked in a new way.

Take beetroot as a case in point. Beetroot is packed with goodness – it guards against coronary artery disease and stroke, for example, and lowers cholesterol levels – but its sweet, earthy flavour is not everyone’s cup of tea. So to make it a regular feature on the menu, you need to be clever. Pair sweet, roasted beetroot with nuts and salty cheeses such as feta or Roquefort to make a substantial salad.

Or serve it with salmon. Salmon is one fish that even fish-haters will eat. It is familiar, and very good for you too. Beetroot and salmon work surprisingly well together, but good seasoning is crucial. In my first recipe here, baked fillets are partnered with a rich beetroot mash. It gets its kick from a good dose of horseradish that balances out all that sweetness, which is enhanced by a good knob of butter. But for younger mouths, feel free to leave the horseradish out.

Beetroot is also amazing in juices and smoothies. In smoothies, too, you get the benefit of all that fibre. I had to tweak it a bit, but this smoothie is delicious. You’ll need a powerful blender, but the results are worth it: a week’s worth of virtue in one glass.

dkemp@irishtimes.com Food cooked and styled by Domini Kemp and Gillian Fallon