Roasted Beet Salad with Mandarin Oranges and Goat Cheese

Full of mandarin oranges, goat cheese, and candied walnuts, this roasted beet salad is the perfect pop during the slow winter produce season. Great for holiday dinners, dinner parties, or any time your CSA gives you too many beets!

This roasted beet salad is one of those recipes that I have been making seemingly forever and wanted to share with you seemingly forever, but never really got my act together enough to take pictures.

And these pictures are, at best, a pretty half-assed attempt. But really, I can’t hold off any longer.

Let’s talk about beets.  Either you are a beet fan, or you’re not.  This isn’t an attempt to hide the beet flavor and win over any beet haters, but if you like beets, this salad is for you.

If you don’t like beets, the good news is that you can pick around them and the rest of the salad is still really delicious, so you can make this for a mixed beet household.

Beets usually pop up in our CSA and at our farmers market both in spring and fall, but for whatever reason, I tend to think of this as a winter and spring salad. Maybe it’s the citrus that makes it seem more wintery. It’s absolutely perfect this time of year as we move between seasons — we can still find winter citrus, but spring produce is just starting to show up, too.

Either way, this roasted beet salad is right at home for celebrations throughout the year. I served it this year for Rosh Hashanah, at our Thanksgiving dinner, and it will probably make another appearance next week for Passover, too. I’ve also served it at countless dinner parties “just because” since it’s one of my favorites.