Beet Ice Cream and Strawberry-Lychee Sorbet

My darling husband eats (and loves to eat!) many things - tendon, stinky tofu, chicken feet, strong blue cheeses... and the list goes on. How else would we have survived seven years together if we didn't share a mutual love of all things food? The funny thing is the foods that turn him off the most seem so innocuous - cauliflower, brussels sprouts, radishes, beets. (Doesn't it sound like someone wasn't taught to appreciate his veggies when he was young? ;)

So what to do when our CSA box contains so many of these goodies? Let's see, the cruciferous vegetables are generally mixed with bacon or pureed into soup. The radishes are mostly pickled and eaten with pho (still don't understand why he likes pickled daikon but is not into pickled radish?!?). But the beets, the beautiful beets, how do I get him to like those?

Last year, I tried a beet salad with blue cheese and nuts (two food groups he really enjoys), but to my consternation they were loved by everyone in the family but him. So this year I decided that I had to take the beets completely out of their usual sideline position and bring them right up to bat.

I tried this recipe from Chef Patrick Fahy, posted by Leela at SheSimmers. I liked that the recipe was measured by weight making it easy to halve the amounts to suit the number of beets I had. I didn't add as many eggs yolks as the recipe called for because once I hit seven (!) egg yolks I figured that there must be a typo somewhere.

Can I tell you that I love (and hate) working with beets? I mean the juice gets everywhere and it stains just about everything, but how can you stay mad at something so gorgeous?

And the final product was a stunning beet red ice cream that was soft and lovely to scoop. We found it a tad on the salty side (which I think was meant to balance out the earthiness inherent in beets) and I felt that the richness needed some balance. Luckily, I had a can of lychees that was getting close to its suggested eating date and some strawberries in the fridge that had definitely seen better days.

The resultant strawberry-lychee sorbet provided the perfect balance in taste, texture and colour. But the question remained, did I change DH's mind about beets? [Drumroll]

Unfortunately no. He still insists that he is not a fan of beets.

Not to worry though, I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve. Beet roesti? Grated raw beet salad? Maybe beet cake? I won't let my farmshare beets go down without a fight. Bring on the beets, Zephyr Organics!