When you’re cooking to make an impression, as I suspect some of you may be this Valentine’s Day, it’s especially important that your dish look as good as it tastes. The expression “you eat first with your eyes” wouldn’t be cliche if there weren’t some truth to it.

This roasted beet and blood orange salad is certainly colorful but it also brings together a mix of winter flavors — sweet and earthy beets with just a little sharpness from blood oranges. Complete with a mix of spicy greens with a few herbs and some crunchy almond slivers.

I like to use golden beets here so that I have an excuse to use my favorite citrus, the blood orange, but you can certainly invert those colors with red or chioggia beets and a more traditional orange.

A little heads up: roasting then cooling the beets will take you about an hour to an hour and a half, mostly unattended, but it’s not like you can just whip this one up right before serving the main course. The beets and the dressing can be prepared well ahead of time, though.

Your ingredients:

3 medium golden beets (red or chioggia will work, or a mix)
2 blood oranges, sectioned, juices reserved
A few handfuls of spicy greens, like a mix of arugula, spinach, frisée and baby lettuces
A few fresh herbs like dill, cilantro or mint
1 tablespoon of good extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons of canola oil
Juice of 1 meyer lemon
1 teaspoon of champagne vinegar
1/2 a clove of garlic or shallot, diced
Slivered almonds
First things first, preheat the oven to 400. Place the beets in the middle of a sheet of foil big enough to wrap them and drizzle them with canola oil. If you’re using a mix of colors of beets, wrap each one separately to keep the colors distinct. Seal the beets in the foil packages and roast them in the oven for 50-60 minutes.

While the beets are roasting, section the oranges, saving as much of the juice as you can by scraping it from the cutting board into a glass and squeezing out the core of the orange. Chill the orange suprêmes in the fridge.

A word here about vinaigrette dressing. What you’re aiming for is an emulsion of an acid, in this case the juice of the meyer lemon and blood orange with a little champagne vinegar, in a fat, canola oil. Oil and vinegar don’t naturally like to combine but with careful attention and a slow hand, you can make it work beautifully.

Dice the garlic or shallot. Mix the garlic (or shallot) with a pinch of kosher salt, one teaspoon of meyer lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of blood orange juice and 1 teaspoon of champagne vinegar. You are more than welcome to adjust to your liking (if you don’t have champagne vinegar, for instance, feel free to go with 2 teaspoons blood orange juice, 1 teaspoon meyer lemon juice), just make sure you end up with 3 teaspoons at the end.

Measure out 3 tablespoons of canola oil, preferably into a container with a spout that will let you pour it slowly (I find that a glass Pyrex liquid measuring cup works brilliantly for this).

Slowly, starting with just a few drops at a time working to a thin drizzle, pour the canola oil into the juice/acid mixture, constantly whisking with a fork. You really can’t go too slowly here or whisk too much.

Back to the beets. Before you pull them out of the oven, prepare an ice bath that’s equal parts ice and water in a medium sized bowl. Check the beets for doneness — if a paring knife easily slides through them, they’re done. Let them cool until you can handle them (about 5-10 minutes) then peel them while they’re still warm. The easiest way is to slice the top then scrape the sides with the sharp edge of a knife, the peel should come right off, and then slice off the bottom. Cut the beets in half lengthwise, then each half in half again lengthwise, then each quarter across the middle for 8 cube-ish pieces. Cool them in the ice bath for at least 15 minutes, again, keeping them separate if using a mix of colors.

Coarsely shred the greens and herbs into bite-sized pieces then rinse and dry them. Put them in a dry bowl then drizzle the olive oil along the side of the bowl, not directly on the greens, then add a pinch of salt and use a pair of tongs or your hands to mix the greens with the oil. The oil will add a little complexity and mouth-feel to the greens without weighing them down too much.

Drain the beets and drizzle them in the vinaigrette and mix to combine. Start the plates with a bed of the greens (let any excess oil drip off before plating) then add the beets, then the blood orange sections, arranged to your liking. Roughly crumble the almonds over top and season with a pinch of kosher salt and a few grinds of black pepper.

This will be a beautiful, simple but elegant start to dinner.