Roasted Beets, Potatoes, with Yogurt, Dill and Pickles (+ Pickle Backs)

Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad

  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
    Still from Javelin's music video for "Canyon Candy."
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
    Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford of the band, Javelin
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
    Maya and George, back in the day on tour with What Cheer? Brigade
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
    Punk rock marching band, What cheer? Brigade, performing.
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad
  • Maya Nayak and George Langford’s Beet + Potato Salad

NOTES

Earthy root vegetables and creamy yogurt are a perfect combo, so please don’t attempt to substitute nonfat yogurt for the rich stuff; you will be sorely disappointed by a thin dressing without any body. Use high-quality pickles (I like half-sour pickles here, but full-sour kosher dills are great too), and serve extra on the side. Pickle Back, a shot of bourbon chased with brine, are a smart and economical use of extra brine, and a new way to take your bourbon.

INSTRUCTIONS

For The Salad:

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and place a rimmed baking sheet in the oven to heat up.

2. Peel the beets and cut them and the potatoes into 1-inch (2.5-cm) cubes. Cut the garlic clove into quarters. Toss all the vegetables with 1 tablespoon of the oil and season with about ½ teaspoon salt and ⅛ teaspoon pepper. Spread the vegetables out in a single layer on the hot baking sheet and roast for 20 minutes, moving them around on the pan with a spatula halfway through.

3. While the veggies are roasting, slice the onion into thin half-moon slivers. Put the onion in a small bowl with the vinegar and ⅛ teaspoon salt, and allow to marinate as the veggies cook.

4. Remove the veggies from the oven and set aside to cool for a few minutes. In a serving bowl, whisk together the remaining 1 tablespoon oil, the yogurt, dill, and any excess vinegar from the onions. Whisk to combine.

5. When the veggies are no longer piping hot but still warm, toss with the yogurt dressing.

6. Scatter the pickles and red onion on top, garnish with dill, and serve.

For The Pickle Back:

1. Using two shot glasses per person, fill one with bourbon the other with pickle brine. Encourage your guests to shoot the bourbon first, then chase it with the salty pickle juice. (It’s better than it seems).

RECIPE

DIFFICULTY

EASY

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SERVES

4

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PREP TIME

35 MINS

Salad

  • medium 
    red beets, tops removed
  • small 
    Yukon Gold potatoes
  • tbs 
    olive oil
  •  
     
    kosher salt
  •  
     
    cracked black pepper
  • clove 
    garlic
  • 1/4 
    small 
    red onion
  • tbs 
    red wine vinegar
  • tbs 
    half-sour pickles cut into ⅛-inch cubes

Dressing

  • tbs 
    full-fat yogurt
  • tbs 
    torn fresh dill fronds

Picklebacks (for 1)

  • 1.5 
    ounces 
    bourbon
  • 1/2 
    ounce 
    sour pickle juice

INSTRUCTIONS

For The Salad:

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and place a rimmed baking sheet in the oven to heat up.

2. Peel the beets and cut them and the potatoes into 1-inch (2.5-cm) cubes. Cut the garlic clove into quarters. Toss all the vegetables with 1 tablespoon of the oil and season with about ½ teaspoon salt and ⅛ teaspoon pepper. Spread the vegetables out in a single layer on the hot baking sheet and roast for 20 minutes, moving them around on the pan with a spatula halfway through.

3. While the veggies are roasting, slice the onion into thin half-moon slivers. Put the onion in a small bowl with the vinegar and ⅛ teaspoon salt, and allow to marinate as the veggies cook.

4. Remove the veggies from the oven and set aside to cool for a few minutes. In a serving bowl, whisk together the remaining 1 tablespoon oil, the yogurt, dill, and any excess vinegar from the onions. Whisk to combine.

5. When the veggies are no longer piping hot but still warm, toss with the yogurt dressing.

6. Scatter the pickles and red onion on top, garnish with dill, and serve.

For The Pickle Back:

1. Using two shot glasses per person, fill one with bourbon the other with pickle brine. Encourage your guests to shoot the bourbon first, then chase it with the salty pickle juice. (It’s better than it seems).

The music I love the most is the music I can listen to while cooking. I need that music to be upbeat but never annoying (my hands are too greasy to change the track, so I gotta set-it-and-forget-it). I’m not just saying this to stroke George’s ego (I think this kind of praise makes him squirm), but his band Javelin, co-created with his cousin, Tom, produces my favorite kitchen jams. They are playful and smart — there’s a song about the allure of our friend’s cat Centerfold, but they also sample world music, recoup a range of thrift store instruments and bring cassette tape players back to life.

Lucky for me, my relationship to Javelin extends beyond fandom. George and Maya were my roommates once upon a time in an un-heated warehouse that we called Building 16. At that time, they were bandmates in the Punk Rock marching band, What Cheer? Brigade. Much of my love for cooking and organizing group meals incubated during our time in this old metal-plating factory in Olneyville, an industrial neighborhood in Providence, R.I. My husband renovated that loft, adding a claw foot tub to the living room, a wood shop in the basement, and he built what we still consider to be the gold-standard of kitchens made from scrap material, with a clutch wheatgrass window-box inset behind the sink. This was the first place of our own that we could really call home. I was finishing up at RISD, George was writing music in the basement, and Maya was working as a landscaper, fostering a love of plants that would eventually lead to their big crazy move to an apple orchard in Western M.A.

Maya and George in Their Own Words

Julia Sherman: George – When did you and Tom start Javelin? Did you guys always make music together growing up?

George Langford: Tom and I started Javelin around 2005, officially, but we grew up playing music and making weird tapes together.

JS: Javelin makes a lot of your sound in unusual ways, using old cassette players, sampling old records. Does that keep it new and interesting for you?

GL: I’ve always been a collector of tape recorders, casios, thrift store stuff. These things are a part of Javelin’s creative process, but we’re full adopters of “modern” tools as well. I just don’t have any rules for how I make sounds. I obsess over new and shiny technology, but it’s important, as “electronic” artists, to limit ourselves and recognize that you probably already have way more than you need to make what you want.

JS: Where exactly is your orchard and when did you move there?

Maya Nayak: We live in Buckland, MA. Actually, it’s in Upper Buckland. Well, it’s really above Upper Buckland on a hill called Snow Mountain, which is a hill more than a mountain, because apparently it snows more on this hill than surrounding ones. We call the orchard Tip Top even though we’re not at the tip top of the hill. The whole thing is rife with contradiction.

JS: Who built the house?

MN: Our house was built in the 1970s by a young couple who ended up living here for 36 years, building and maintaining a small but intensive orchard and homesteading. It was a kit house, and they put it together themselves, often in the dark after work, lit only with headlights. It definitely explains some of the wonkiness (which we love)!

JS: I remember when you found the place, it really felt like fate.

MN: The original couple sold the house to the host of a HGTV-type homemaker show and ended up filming multiple seasons of her show here and kind of doing a “makeover” on the house without really fixing anything. We found the house on craigslist right at a time that it was becoming  clear that staying in NYC long term wasn’t going to work for us. We went up to see it on a whim (we’d never gone to see a property with a realtor before), flipped our shit when we saw the place, and made an offer the next day. The rest is history, as they say. We moved up here from Brooklyn 2 months later. We’ve been here almost 4 years now. We love it here, and we love the house so much.

JS: George, has your creative process changed since you moved to the orchard?

GL: Living out in the hills gives me a lot of mental space to create and has freed me of this annoying sense of competition that I felt creeping in when we lived in the city. (I hadn’t wanted to admit that it was in me. For some reason, it took leaving to really recognize it, name it and work to erase it.)

JS: What was the biggest shock to taking over that property?

MN: Hard to pick! Buying your first house was major. Buying a neglected, unusual orchard was major in a whole other kind of way. Having a kid was also major! When you do all these things simultaneously and for the first time, life is shocking.

JS: Maya, as someone who has always worked with plants, and done so much urban gardening, how does this project differ and is there anything you miss about working on other people’s gardens?

MN: Well, first of all this place is way beyond a garden, or even two; it’s a big property with woods and fields and orchards and lots of mixed-use spaces. It takes a lot of work just to keep paths mowed and give the apple trees the most basic level of care.  It’s not like the estates I used to work on, which had a maintenance crew to make them tick and look like magazine spreads. I spent years breaking my back (and being paid well) to make outdoor spaces “perfect.” This place is FUNKY. It’s just me and George taking care of it in our spare time, and we have no landscaping budget and very little free time to garden.

JS: What is the plan with the apples now?

MN: We have a wholesale buyer, Artifact Cider Project, who we love and hope to continue to work with, and we’re not really sure what other plans we have for the apples. Every harvest is so different, it’s hard to plan. We have a lot of ideas for more ways to use the orchard, but nothing concrete yet.

JS: How was it to see your apples made into something can be distributed like that?

MN: Artifact Cider Project made a small batch, single-origin cider from our orchard and name it after us. All the glory, none of the work! Well, we picked all the apples, but they took it from there. They’re great guys, and great cider makers. We are super proud and very flattered, and we also really liked the cider (it’s sold out now)! We hope to do more such projects with them in the future.

JS: Does it annoy you when people romanticize the idea of leaving the city and moving to a farm now? I experienced the reality with you that first harvest and it was very stressful!

MN: It’s not annoying. It is romantic! But…the reality is super unromantic. We have learned a lot more about the pros/cons of both inter-dependency and independence. Sometime we really miss New York… but we’ve deeply connected with this place and find it difficult to imagine ever returning to city life. We definitely caution some starry-eyed people about how much physical work goes into living in a remote location on a large property. It’s not a vacation. But it’s s-u-u-u-u-u-u-per beautiful, and that’s worth it all.

JS: You guys were once in a band together. Can you tell me about your experience in the What Cheer? Brigade?

Maya Nayak: It’s a little hard to sum up our experience in the band briefly. I was one of the founding members, and I invited George to join in the early days so we could harness his incredible percussive talent (and so that I could flirt with him more easily.) We both ended up playing bass drum (him on Surdu, me on a more traditional marching bass drum) so together,  we held it down, so to speak.

JS: Love connections in the band must happen all the time?

MN: We were maybe the first band couple? Definitely not the last. We soon moved into Building 16, which became the band HQ and practice space and all our roommates were also bandmates. It defined our lives for 3 years and we had a ton of fun. It feels like a really long time ago now. We are very proud and fond of all of our alums.

JS: George, has being out in the woods changed your practice at all?

GL: Living out in the hills gives me a lot of mental space to create and has freed me of this annoying sense of competition that I felt creeping in when we lived in the city. (I hadn’t wanted to admit that it was in me. For some reason, it took leaving to really recognize it, name it and work to erase it.)