Food Pairing 101: What goes well with a Roast Beet Sandwich?

I was fourteen and found myself in a steakhouse where they actually asked you how you wanted your meat cooked. I, not wanting to appear uneducated in front of my new girl, blurted out "rare." This was the only level of meat cooking that I had ever heard about because it was in some movie I had seen. When the waitress brought it out, I took one bite, and I pushed it away. I was getting lightheaded from the pink insides and the blood that was coagulating on my plate and chin. My girlfriend's mom talked me through the meat cooking levels and I eventually decided on having it returned to me in medium well form.

This was one experience, blood dripping down my face, that I hadn't been able to replicate as a vegetarian (not that I was really trying). That all changed tonight with this Roast Beet Sandwich courtesy of the Chubby Vegetarian. This thing dripped, dropped and stained my teeth like I had just bitten into a still living jaguar. I made some slight alterations to his recipe. First there was no champagne vinegar as I'm not that high class. I left it out. Second, I had no lemon zest so I subtracted that and added a little bit of citrus juice of the lime kind. Shallots weren't around so I used half an onion and a clove of garlic instead. The lettuce became spinach and the horseradish became something much more tolerable, mustard. Other than that, I followed the Chubby's take.

My "bloody" fingers.

While the Bloody Beetroots would be the trendy choice for this post, I went with something a little more American. Stuyvesant is a New Jersey band that sings about a kleptomaniacal girl that lives in Minnesota. What says land of opportunity better than that? Stuyvesant does it with stuttering guitars, rolling drums and a pop punk sensibility that doesn't bother me one bit. That's hard to do. "St. Cloud" comes from their album, Fret Sounds, which will be out June 14th.

Stuyvesant - "St. Cloud" by dromedary

If you want something a little more colorful and British, try out "Mrs. Violet" by Joe Cave. Joe is a 23 year old singer-songwriter from London who is attempting to write and record 99 new songs this year. He is releasing the songs on his tumblr blog. "Mrs. Violet" was the first of these songs to make its way into video form.

Keep the blood running!