NY Times Roasted Beets with Chiles, Ginger, Yogurt and Indian Spices

So unlike most of my cooking experiments, this dish did not result from either purchasing a set of ingredients and then determining how to prepare them or deliberatively searching for a recipe and then purchasing the required ingredients.  Instead, I just happened to click on the link for this recipe and then decided it looked good enough to try the next time I went to the market.  

As you may recall, two years ago I joined a CSA and was suddenly flush with beets.  Seriously, as I think back to that summer, I feel like the only items I ever got from the CSA all summer were beets and Japanese turnips.  Unfortunately, I never got that creative with preparing the beets — I would roast them and include them in various dishes, slice them with a mandoline and make beet chips (never could get the baking process right though), or just throw them away.  At some point, you can really just get "beet" dealing with this root vegetable (pun intended!).

So when I saw this NYTimes.com recipe that prepared the beets with Indian spices, I was intrigued.  For some unknown reason, I had completely ignored using my Indian spices with beets in the past, and this recipe was almost too good to be true — simple, used ingredients easily accessible in my pantry, and spicy.  I picked up some yellow beets at the farmer's market, and as I thought, put the dish together with ease.  The result was really great — well-spiced, healthy, and the yogurt sauce was really amazing and could go well with a number of dishes.  The only alterations I made were to omit the lime juice from the yogurt because I just didn't have a lime, and to increase the cooking time for the beets by another ten minutes or so despite cutting the beets smaller than what the recipe called for.  I think the next time I prepare this recipe, I will cover the beet chunks with foil while they roast because the prepared beets were a little drier than I would have liked.  I will also continue to cut the beet pieces smaller than the one-inch chunks called for in the original recipe because I felt I had a good spice-to-beet ratio in each bite.