Roasted Beetroot, Fennel and Apple Salad

This roasted veg salad is a delicious and colourful addition to your campfire cooking repertoire. Roasted beetroot changes from being quite an earthy root vegetable into a sweet one. It’s a good way to use raw beetroot which are cheap and easy to buy in the supermarket and very reliable to grow in the vegetable garden. When preparing this salad recently, one ADULT Scouter didn’t know what it was! So if healthy eating is a theme for your Campfire Kitchen, this is a tasty way to introduce an underused vegetable.

Fennel, as well, isn’t used that often in campfire cookery or in BBQs. It is a bit of a Marmite, people tend to like it or hate it and there is a reason for this; when chopping the vegetables at my last camp, one scouter started sniffing the air suspiciously.

“Can anyone smell… something alcoholic?”

“No,” someone replied.

“Like… like…” she continued.

“Sambuca?” I interrupted.

“YES!”

And that sambuca aroma is the fennel. That strong aniseed flavour is what can divide people. Found a lot in Mediterranean food and often Italian food, fennel is sweet and crunchy and works well with roasted beetroot.

In this roasted veg salad, these two underused vegetables, beetroot and fennel, are roasted on the campfire and tossed with crisp apples and peppery rocket and then mixed with a tangy, silky honey mustard vinaigrette dressing. A note on the dressing, it is very easy to make and I’ve included a recipe here but you’ll be forgiven if you opt to use a bottle. Sometimes it’s about ease and convenience too.

Don’t judge your results by my pictures here. When I was preparing this, I was making four times the amount this recipe calls for. I made this roasted beetroot, fennel and apple salad as a side dish for this Blazing Salmon dish. In fact you can see the tin foil parcels on the fire.