I made two recipes from Vegan with a Vengeance this week as planned: orange-glazed beets and sweet potatoes with five-spice and watercress.

Both are good. Beets I’m ambivalent about. Not to put too fine a point on it, they taste a bit like dirt to me. A nicer way of putting it would be to say they have an earthy flavor. But I wanted to give them a chance. The orange glaze is sweet but not too sweet, and mellows them out a bit. Not bad. If I wanted to eat beets regularly I’d probably include this recipe in my repertoire, and given the nutritional profile and cheapness of beets, I probably should. No B12 though — damn!

The sweet potatoes I can rave about unreservedly — the five-spice combines nicely with them, the garlic adds a bit of savoriness, and the watercress a topping of freshness. This is listed as a brunch dish but could really be any meal. You could substitute other light, fresh-flavored greens (arugula and similar), but spinach would be too, well, spinachy, in my opinion.

Both recipes are easy and quick, with most of the work devoted to peeeling and cutting the vegetables and stripping the stems from the watercress; a little more prep for the other ingredients and you stick them in a skillet and cook them 10-20 minutes, and you’re set.

By and large, a double success on this one.