Roasted Beet Salad with Hazelnuts

I had some strange eating habits as a kid.

Cereal without milk.

Macaroni without cheese.

Salad without dressing.

Today I still don't drink milk, but I have started to eat cereal with yogurt. I've discovered that macaroni and cheese can be delicious when its homemade.

And I've even come to appreciate that extra touch that dressing can add to salad.

This salad is a perfect example. It needs the dressing to pull it all together, to balance out the bites where there's no beets or hazelnuts. It's a light dressing, and it just barely covers the lettuce and the beets.

While the dressing is delightful, the beets are the real start of this salad. Look for the red and the gold. Not only do they add a beautiful color contrast (if you don't store them together like I did so the colors bleed!) to the salad, I found they tasted different too, with the golden beets being a bit sweeter.

Nutella Scones

I have a bookshelf full of cookbooks in my bedroom. Yes, it's just a small bookshelf, but it's full and overflowing now into a tall, neat pile on the floor. Baked Explorations that I got for my birthday is one of those cookbooks. As I started planning a menu for our recent camping trip, Baked's Nutella Scones jumped out at me. We needed these scones to launch our trip.

Toasting the hazelnuts was the first adventure. They had to be toasted in the oven for 8 to 10 minutes, and then placed into a towel. Each hazelnut had to have its skin rubbed off! Quite a bit of skin came off in the general rubbing, but some needed to be individually scrubbed. There were hazelnut skins everywhere by the time I was done.

Some of the directions in the recipe were a little confusing, and I googled "Nutella Scones" to find some handy how-to guides. I found so many beautiful blog posts about these scones, many of them from the group Baked Sunday Mornings that's baking through Baked Explorations; I'm hoping to bake along with the group and am particularly excited they haven't made either of the Mississippi Mud Pies yet!). I searched and searched for pictures of what I needed. However, none of the blog posts detailed how to roll the dough up, stand it on its end and gently flatten it.

I figured out why. I made the scone dough and flattened it. I spread Nutella over it (crisscrossed, it was beautiful). I rolled it up and stood it on its end. I took photographs all along the way.

Then, I started to flatten it. Taking photographs was not an option. My hands were covered with the Nutella that oozed out everywhere. It wasn't until the dough was flattened into a circle and my hands were washed that I was able to take a photograph. So, I apologize for leaving you in the same situation, but just trust your gut instinct. Flattening it wasn't as hard as I thought.

These scones went with us on our canoeing trip last weekend, and they provided us with a little nourishment during the car ride. Because I was transporting them individually, I avoided drizzling them with Nutella and instead brought it for people to slather on as desired in the car.

And a special thank you to NPR for featuring Nutella this week and giving me ideas about how to use up the remaining Nutella in my pantry. I'm debating between the Nutella ice cream and a Nutella tartine for breakfast tomorrow.