I'm partial to Sally Schneider's steam-roasting technique in "A New Way to Cook." You put the unpeeled beets in a roasting dish, and add about 1/4" of water. Cover the dish with foil, then roast at 425 for 45 minutes or an hour. Once cool, you can slip the skins right off the beets. I think it's the easiest and tastiest way to cook beets.
I peel and cut them up and cook like potatoes but I add a tbsp of reed wine vinegar to the water. When I serve them I put a little cinnamon on them. So far even the picky eaters in my house eat them with no problem!
That's exactly how I got our non-beet eater to eat beats, too. Instead of using balsamic dressing, I made a dressing of fresh orange juice and walnut oil. You may also want to try goat cheese instead of the blue cheese sometime. Both work really well. The really nice thing about roasting the beats in the foil is that the skins just slip off. Wear rubber gloves, though, if you want to avoid staining your hands.
I have spent years hating beets- even though I had tried them every year in every way. I finally started to think I could appreciate them and set out to cook them. I tossed them in oil, wrapped in foil and roasted about an hour until they were tender, then peeled, quartered, tossed in oil/s&p and roasted again until browned. I served them in a salad with a toasted walnut, balsamic dressing, blue cheese crumbles and bitter greens. I suppose you could say I was trying to mask them a bit, but it turns out each of those flavors paired so well with the earthy, sweet beets that I took a true step toward liking them outright.
I am on a quixotic campaign to end the use of aluminum in food preparation and storage. You can use a covered roasting dish, or parchment, and skip the potential heavy metal poisoning.
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