Roasted Beetroot with Thyme

October. The garden is winding down and the beetroot are the last thing still asking to be pulled. They come out of the soil heavy and cool, with that particular earthy smell that tells you exactly what season you're in. I scrub them at the outside tap, and by the time they reach the kitchen my hands are stained the colour of old wine. It doesn't wash off for a day. I don't mind.

Roasting beetroot is barely cooking. You wrap them in foil, put them in a hot oven, and walk away. The heat does everything: concentrates the sugars, deepens the colour from muddy red to something closer to garnet, turns the flesh from dense and raw to soft and yielding. The thyme, tucked inside the parcel, scents the whole thing without ever shouting. When you open the foil, the kitchen smells of earth and warmth and something faintly herbal. I wrote it down in the notebook once: beetroot, thyme, October rain. That was the whole entry.

This is a side dish, but it has a habit of becoming the centre. Put a plate of roasted beetroot on the table next to whatever else you've made, and watch where people's forks go. There are few better feelings than that. We're only making dinner, but dinner is worth making well.