You know winter is really dragging on when Teri is trying out new recipes for beets!
Most of my readers know by now that beets aren’t a hit in our household. Jon was forced to clean his plate as a kid and remembers swallowing them whole, just to make them go away. I don’t remember ever eating them, or Mom making anything other than borscht with them. At any rate, it’s funny that the one veggie that we reliably have year-round is one that we all don’t prefer.
We still eat them, though! Often I prepare them by roasting them in a closed casserole dish with a bit of water until they’re very soft, then dice them and keep them on hand for easy addition to salads and bowls. Our favourite way to eat them is grated raw. They’re not our first choice, but they grow easily for us and they store well, and to us those two points trump any of our taste preferences!
I was wishing I had more beet recipes in my arsenal to use as that’s one of the few storage veggies we have left now. I found this one and tried it and was surprised it turned out as well as it did!
Caramelized Roasted Beets Recipe
I followed the recipe but used shallots instead of onions, and definitely the full 60 minutes of cook time. I also made a whole pan of them: why not. My kitchen secret is always cooking way more than one serving, we eat a lot of “bowl-style” meals where we mix in whatever’s going in the fridge: leftovers make that simple. The best part of this recipe was chopping and mixing them with soft cheese the next day and eating them cold as a salad!
Seeding Update:
Myrah and I helped Jon with this week’s seeding list as it’s the biggest week we’ve had for seeding so far. Jon has seeded tomatoes, fennel, green onions, the second planting of celery, and chard this week. Myrah and I did the flowers and herbs. Typically I seed way too many herbs, demote them on the priority list when it’s time to transplant, they end up getting really unwieldly and then getting stuck in the soil wherever is left open, barely alive. Last year I created a permanent herb bed in front of the second greenhouse, which was an improvement. I’m hoping that with less seeded this year and a spot already prepared for them, I’ll have better execution. Herbs aren’t a huge thing for our CSA, but they are hugely important in my own kitchen and a handful of CSA members who also “get it”.
We started thyme, rosemary, oregano, garlic chives, sage, and borage (the flowers taste like cucumbers and bees love them!). Any gaps we’ll fill from Walker’s Greenhouse. I already have mint and tarragon established, and recommend you buy cuttings of those rather than seeding them, the varieties available in seed packets are typically poor quality. You want French Tarragon (the Russian doesn’t even taste like tarragon!) and in my experience “Mojito” mint is the best variety in terms of flavour and vigour. I hope to snag a few lemonbalm plants yet, and we will be growing basil eventually, plus direct seeding our most popular herbs, dill and cilantro.
We don’t grow lavender. It’s the one thing in the plant world I absolutely can’t stand! I potted some up yesterday at Walker’s and almost revolted!
Myrah was a great help writing out the tags and planting the seeds! Then we sorted all the tags that we’ll need in the future. Once the tomatoes are potted up we label every plant to prevent against mix ups! We reuse these tags every year, and also use some cut up plastic venetian blinds for some of our tags, which works great too!
This is an extra blog post this week as we were supposed to be picking up our chicks today, but they are stormed in at Russell and not arriving until tomorrow. Very disappointing day for us, but we will get them in the morning, and we’re ready for them!
Check back soon for baby chick photos!
T 🙂
Brown Sugar Produce 
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