Nosh: Roasted Spiced Beet Tatin

I'm not sure why, but I woke up yesterday with a hankering for beets, and a desire to putter around in the kitchen. Sometimes, good things happen when I start to putter. Mmmm, beets. Sweet, earthy, dense, jewel-colored, beautiful. Beets!A few days ago a friend of mine posted a link to a beet tarte tatin, which is basically beets made like an upside down cake, topped with puff pastry. Savory beets + buttery pastry? I'm in! But here's the thing: every single recipe for a beet tarte tatin that I found online involved drowning roasted beets in butter and sugar, before baking them inside pastry that is inherently butter-gorged. It's a delicious idea in principle, but this? Is totally unnecessary. Beets are the candy of the vegetable world. They're grown FOR their sugar. Adding sugar to them is overkill. And how much butter do you really need to eat at dinner? Save your butter intake for the shortbreads you're sure to encounter this holiday season.So what's a girl to do? We improvise.Here's the basic principle of a tarte tatin: arrange edibles in a pleasing design in the bottom of a cake pan, cover with puff pastry, bake, invert, eat. Got it. Now let's get to it! REMEMBER: This is a dish made for a day you have time to putter; it will probably take about an hour and a half (maybe even closer to two hours) from start to finish, between the prep-work and the cook time. And so, with no further ado...

• 3 good-sized beets, scrubbed, peeled, and cut into quarters, then roasted according to this recipe (so you'll also need thyme/rosemary/cinnamon/red pepper flakes, red wine and balsamic vinegars, salt & pepper, see recipe link for specifics)
• 1 large red onion
•  1 smallish handful (1/4 cup, maybe?) pine nuts; walnuts (chopped) would also be nice here if you didn't have pine nuts on hand
• 1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
• 1/2 cup grated horseradish cheese or Swiss cheese (optional)
• olive oil

Take the puff pastry out of the freezer and let it sit on the counter to defrost. Don't leave it in the fridge to defrost; I've found out the hard way that it won't defrost in there as much as you would like. Just set it on a plate on your counter top and forget about it for the next 50 minutes or so.  I'm assuming you're using frozen puff pastry, because... No reason. Just because. Look, I make a lot of stuff from scratch. But delicate pastries like this? I'll buy it pre-packaged, thank you very much.  Preheat the oven to 400°, because the first thing you'll want to do is peel and roast the beets. Bear in mind that you want them to look pretty post-roast, so when you prep them for roasting, cut them into uniform-looking quarters. The fatter ends of the beets are pretty dense, so give these about 40-45 minutes to roast. Toss with herbs, spices, vinegars, salt and pepper, and oil, and put it in the oven. Turn once about halfway through. When they're done, set them aside, but you'll be using them fairly soon after they're out of the oven so don't worry about letting them cool completely. Drop the oven temperature to 350°.While the beets are roasting, thinly slice the red onion into nice, big rounds, sprinkle them with some salt, toss them with oil, and get them in a pan over medium-low heat. These are going to caramelize, and that takes...oh, about 40-45 minutes. Once they start to soften and turn gold, then brown, you will need to pay a little attention to them. You don't want them to get crisp, just soft and sweet, so stir them fairly often. If you notice them starting to stick to the bottom of the pan, you can do one of two things to loosen them. You can 1) add more oil, which I don't favor, because I feel like it just fattens up the works, or 2) toss in a little veggie broth or water, which I do favor. It also helps steam them into softness, and is that much less oil you need to worry about. Eventually, the onions will turn rich and brown and soft and super-sweet, and you'll remember that the world is indeed a beautiful place, that you can extract such gorgeous flavor from a sulfuric root vegetable.Once the beets are cooked and the onions are caramelized, take an 8-inch cake pan and grease it with a little bit of olive oil (meaning: pour a little dime-sized spot of olive oil in the cake pan and rub it around the bottom and sides with a bit of paper towel). Start to arrange your beets in a pretty pattern. Pay attention to this detail because it will figure into the presentation later. When you invert the tatin to serve it, you'll want the beets to be the stars of the show. Try and imagine how they'll look, upside down and backwards. :)Nice, evenly-spaced circles look great and require practically no skill to arrange. That's what I went for.Top this with caramelized onions, and then top the onions with a sprinkling of pine nuts.The beets and the onions are both seasoned with salt and/or pepper, so I wouldn't opt to add any more seasoning at this stage. Just let the foods as they've been cooked come together. Top the beets and onions with the sheet of puff pastry. You may need to roll the puff pastry out to get it to cover the entirety of the pan, but that's easy to do. Just lay it on a flat surface and make a few passes over it with a rolling pin. It should readily stretch. Then you just lay it out on top of your cake pan, trim off any crazy excess corners, and tuck the pastry all around the edges of the pan.Note the holes. This dough is docked, which means I poked a bunch of holes in it with a fork. Now it won't bake up to be super-puffy, just kind of puffy, yet still totally delicious. Put it in the oven for 30 minutes, turning once half-way through. When you take it out, it should be toasted and beautiful.Let this sit for 10 minutes to give the tatin a chance to set. Now is the time to decide what to do: do you want to serve it as-is? Or do you intend to top it with cheese and broil it for a few minutes? Because...If you want to serve it as-is, put the serving dish you plan to present it on, on top of the cake pan. If you want to top it with cheese and put it in the broiler, put a cookie sheet on top of the cake pan. Then: FLIP!I told you that my anal-retentive attention to detail would pay off. Wait, let's get another food-porn look at this, shall we?I did choose to top this with horseradish cheese, because I think almost everything is better with horseradish cheese. But for real, it is perfectly heavenly right now. You could go cheeseless and be fine. But me?  I cheesed it up and stuck it under the broiler for a few more minutes.We ate this with a simple tossed salad with arugula, and a roasted pear and pumpkin soup (recipe coming). It was a table full of warm, wintery comfort. It wasn't a speedy dish to put together, it was absolutely a "Sunday in the kitchen" sort of meal, but it's surprisingly easy and oh, so, so satisfying. Enjoy! I know I did.