Red Beet Salad with Sour Cream Dressing

Many cold climate countries enjoy a good mix of subterranean vegetables in their salads. We adapted a recipe from Beatrice Ojakangas's Scandinavian Feasts to throw together a potato-beet salad that brings the heartiness of winter and the splashy colors of spring into a single bowl.

We used 1.5 pounds of baby red potatoes (new potatoes are ideal, but were not in season), a little more than a half pound of cooked beets (we chose some imported from France precooked, but you can obviously cook your own if you have time), three whole pickles, one lemon, a bunch of fresh dill, one cup of plain yogurt, and spice to taste. This should serve 10.

Boil the potatoes, drain, and let cool before cutting them up. We split them in half and then quartered the halves.

Chop up the beets, reserving the beet juice on the side.

Chop up the pickles. We took the salad to a friend's place, so we put in ingredient into separate plastic bags and then mixed the salad just before serving it. It's probably smart to do the same anytime you want to prepare the salad in advance to avoid sogginess and beet juice miasma.

This might look nasty, but it'll taste good on the salad. It's a mix of the yogurt, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and the reserved beet juice. You can mix it into the salad, but it is often served on the side.

Tangy, colorful, pickle-y -- what more can a Norwegian want?