Beets Beets Beets

With all the food I helped harvest in Boulder in addition to our farm shares we get each week, I've been spending a TON of time in the kitchen these past few weeks. For example, today I was expecting to simply make the apple crisp in 1 hour, but I ended up working in the kitchen for over 4 hours making all sorts of things. Here is a mumbo-jumbo mix of the things I've been working on this past week:

I got a ton of potatoes this past week in our farm share. I was going to make just some mashed potatoes but then decided to add some of the boiled beets I'd picked and prepared last week. I started by sauteeing some garlic and chives in EVOO then added the mashed veggies, Earth Balance (vegan butter) and rice milk. They are delicious and my favorite color! ;)

I also decided to roast some potatoes in EVOO, rosemary and garlic. I added the course salt I bought last weekend in addition to some pepper and they were awesome. Britney and I devoured them as soon as they cooled!

I peeled all the beets because they were so dirty and then cut some up to boil them. Here are all the different beets in a bowl of water, waiting to be cooked!

How beautiful, right? This was my first year of seeing such unique beets!

Here are the boiled beets. I ate some plain, put some in a salad and threw others into the mashed potatoes and beets.

Here are the apples after we cut them, boiled them and drained them to make the applesauce. 

Roasted beets! Oh they were so delicious I ate them all for lunch one day haha! I definitely had my fare share of beets this week!

Salt-roasted potatoes. I found the recipe in The Week and was concerned it would be wasteful with all that used salt. I used course salt and threw some time into the salt (I don't think that did anything at all). I used the bigger potatoes that I had and then also used some beets too. I shouldn't have peeled the beets though because they looked funky, all black and bubbly later after being cooked. The potatoes didn't end up tasting all that special, simply cooked. I wouldn't probably do it again just due to all the salt I used (and have kept, so maybe I will do it again just to re-use the salt and to try and make it more exciting) and the long time needed to cook the beets.

The blacked, boiled beets and potatoes. The potatoes look pretty, the beets not so much!

Borsche!! I made it myself and I made it vegan. I threw in all sorts of things and am pretty proud of it. We had so much food in our fridge this past week that I actually haven't ate any of it, but I do have 2 containers of it in the freezer for future use; I made a lot!! I used soy milk and even included some beet greens into the soup. The one annoying thing was that the beet greens wrapped themselves around my immersion blender blade and that was a pain to clean. Otherwise it's a nice, thick soup full of nutrients!

Another shot of the purple-pink soup!

That night, last Sunday, was Jill's night to make dinner. It was beautiful and so simple too! Brown rice, refried beans with cilantro in them. Then she sauteed a bunch of veggies (peppers, carrots, etc) and made her own salsa. I loved loved loved the dish and can't wait to try it myself. The one issue I have is that I usually use dried beans so making refried beans will take several steps and lots of planning. I think I can do it, I'll just have to figure it out and expect to spend a good amount of time in the kitchen!

Terrible picture of the tomato/pasta sauce I made today. I had all those beautiful heirloom tomatoes hanging out in my fridge all week and I started to worry that they would go bad. A lot of them actually seemed fine but I didn't know when I'd get another chance to use them. I've had a few delicious sandwiches and salads with the fresh tomatoes so I decided I'd use up all but one and make a veggie pasta sauce a la Pam. I included a white onion, a head of garlic (a very small head), two banana peppers (I've been getting too many spicier peppers to know what to do with), basil, S &P and of course the tomatoes. Oh I also added a few of the carrots I got from my farm that were smaller in size and the skin of the eggplant that I used to make the babaganoush out of. I just froze the whole amount I used in a large tupper ware because, as I keep saying, our fridge is overflowing with food and I don't want any of it to go bad! I'm not complaining, I'm just saying!! I think it's part of the bargain when joining a farm :)