Welcome, everyone, to another year of Vegan MoFo Iron Chef!  Katie, who usually hosts this competition, has put her faith in me this month.

Fridays during the month of October will feature Iron Chef Challenges, wherein participants will use the week’s secret ingredient in a unique dish and post a link to the recipe. On Sundays I will do a roundup of the participating blogs’ dishes.

This week I wanted to chose an ingredient that is used in cuisines around the world, is fairly inexpensive, and can be used in a diversity of dishes.  According to Wikipedia, this vegetable has been cultivated since the second millennium BC, so I’m sure there are a few recipes to guide you through this challenge.

A quick review of our few simple rules/guidelines:

1. Whatever you come up with has to be new, nothing from a cookbook or a blog, not something you posted last week that happens to involve the secret ingredient. It’s fine to use a recipe for a jump-off point, but make it your own!
2. Entries are due at 3 pm PST on Sunday.
3. Have fun and be creative!

Let’s not beet around the bush. (Did you guess the secret ingredient just then?)

The secret ingredient is BEETROOT!

Think pickled/steamed/roasted/pureed/boiled/shredded beets, beet greens, beet juice as dye…really beets are quite a diverse vegetable! With their natural sweetness, they lend themselves to both sweet and savory dishes.

To participate, just comment on this entry with the link to your blog post by Sunday, 3 pm PST.

PS- I apologize for posting this late.  Work gets in the way sometimes.  For this reason, if you don’t get around to posting your links until a little after 3 p.m. on Sunday, I’ll try to still feature your dish in the roundup!  I’ll be posting the challenges earlier in upcoming weeks.