Last summer was my first real fling with beets.

I am enthralled with these color-bleeding, edible and bursting-with-flavor globes. Beets tuck right into that whole ugly swan story, appearing ugly, or at least starting out ugly but later transformed into something breath-taking. Beets are that way: ugly ducklings waiting to be transformed into swan-form. Who would think these scary rooted, a bit hairy, little studded dirt balls could turn into charmers that steal your meal-time show?

I am still getting to know beets.

Beet Info (borrowed happily from world’s healthiest foods):

• The pigment that gives beets their rich, purple-crimson color is a powerful cancer-fighting agent.
• Beets are particularly rich in the B vitamin folate, which is essential for normal tissue growth. Eating folate-rich foods is especially important during pregnancy.
• Both beets and Swiss chard are different varieties within the same plant family
• Beets’ value grew in the 19th century when it was discovered that they were a concentrated source of sugar, and the first sugar factory was built in Poland.
• Store beets unwashed in the refrigerator crisper where they will keep for two to four weeks.
  • (Cut the majority of the greens and their stems from the roots, so they do not pull away moisture away from the root. Leave about two inches of the stem attached to prevent the roots from “bleeding.” Store the unwashed greens in a separate plastic bag where they will keep fresh for about four days).
• Raw beets do not freeze well since they tend to become soft upon thawing. Freezing cooked beets is fine; they’ll retain their flavor and texture.
• A Few Quick Serving Ideas:
  • Simply grate raw beets for a delicious and colorful addition to salads or decorative garnish for soups.
  • Add chunks of beet when roasting vegetables in the oven.
  • Serving homemade vegetable juice? A quarter of a beet will turn any green drink into a sweet pink concoction, pleasing both the eyes and the taste buds.
  • Healthy sauté beet greens with other braising greens such as chard and mustard greens.
  • Marinate steamed beets in fresh lemon juice, olive oil, and fresh herbs.

Last night, I made beets via my kitchen sink method (aka start pulling out ingredients, preparing them and then seeing how they fit together at the meal—a sometimes disastrous, yet sometimes brilliant maneuver). I decided to roast the beets, since I had a pile of them from my CSA box. And they grabbed worthy attention.

I took about 6 small beets, peeled them and quartered them (think 1/2 inch cubes). I blended 1 T olive oil, 1 T maple syrup, and 1/2 tsp coarse salt vigorously; then added oil mix to beets to lightly cover. I roasted them for 25 minutes at 400. Then, via the kitchen sink method instead of just eating them plain, we ended up putting them on top of our crisp green salad—with blue cheese dressing. It worked. Next time, I will PLAN to make the beets for the salad; with the air that I meant to do it all along.

More beet recipes? It beets me—but visit these kitchens:

• Loving this from Nami-Nami; she had the same idea as me—beetroot and blue cheese—but my salad is her tartlet
• Milk and Cookies makes beetroot dip, then places a colorful dollop atop crostini
• Brilynn from Jumbo Empanadas tosses a lovely roasted beet salad
• And for Farro Beet Risotto (gorgeous color); head over to Beyond Salmon

I love good soups. When a good soup meets my lips and warms my throat down to my belly, even my toes get a wiggle.

This is a perfect time of year for soups; and for using my favorite kitchen tool: an immersion blender. You don’t need one for this soup, of course, but if you do then your kids will come running when you power it up: can I try mom? Would you like me to help? (Music to my ears).

Certainly it counts as their daily good deed for lent. Helping mom make dinner. How could you argue with that? Just because it is fun doesn’t mean it doesn’t count (of course, I tell them, helping fold that mountain of socks or taking out the compost are also very good deed ideas…).

Pumpkin Ginger Soup
3 T butter
2/3 cup chopped onion
8 ounces cubed butternut squash
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves
1/8 tsp cardamom
3 cups chicken broth
2/3 cup canned pumpkin
2/3 cup carrots
2 T brown sugar

3 T butter in large pot over medium heat. Add onions and pinch salt; cook, stirring for 10 minutes. Add squash, low-medium heat, cooking for 20 more minutes. Add garlic, 1 T olive oil, and the spices. Cook 5-7 minutes. Add broth, carrots and pumpkin. Bring to boil, then reduce to simmer. Cook 25 minutes then puree. Stir in brown sugar and salt to taste.

A day in the life of.

I often find the cumulative list of ‘things to do today’ an odd and funny allotment. Whether officially on a list or not, these items filled my day:

Drop off car at the shop; walk home.
(Note to self: figure out how to get the kids home from school).
Gather laundry from soccer piles and bathroom floors, take mushroom debacle out to trash.
Reorganize online bookmarks. Edit blog posts. Spray lamp base black.
Buy cold medicine. Eat granola. Build fire.
Review websites for client, reschedule phone conference.
Reheat pizza for lunch.
Consolidate stray paper airplanes.
Phone husband to remind him I love him.
Play photographer: snap photos of lamp base, earthy beets on a wooden plank…
Buy hand-wipes for my family, to fend off germs.
Call friend to vent, share and schedule lunch.
Remove fish from freezer for dinner.

Reminds me of an egg scramble, or what my aunt calls her ‘kitchen sink scramble.’ When whatever you have on hand is what goes into the skillet; a bit of cooking from the hip, where you add a bit of this and that with a generous pinch of salt and ideally, a snotty deliberateness. A look requiring no words, that states: “I meant to do that.”

In the middle of online bookmarks, newly blackened lamps, running the washing machine and getting kids from A to B: I make the executive decision to apply the kitchen sink method to my cooking for the next few days.

My last few dinners have been about me digging through my freezer, figuring out how to fill the meal void with a mountain of veggies, some new recipes, and aiming toward a family goal of trying new seafoods (it is good for you, so we are aiming to ‘find fish’ that we like: tonight we try a sampling of mahi mahi and tilipia). I sometimes enjoy using as many ingredients as I can from my fridge and freezer, throwing caution to the wind, not so perfectly matching the veggie with the entree or soup… sometimes kitchens remain inspired because you pull out the stops, take a new angle, or simply aim to use up your ingredients. I doubt smores were deliberate. Even a sandwich came to be because someone needed two slices of bread to hold together a selected pile of ingredients…

I cringe to put this photo here; for gorgeousness to define this recipe, hop over to Pinch My Salt.

I ran out of time to take a brilliant photo; I made this recipe, skipped the whip topping (no time), cut these beauties out of their muffin tin, dumped them on a plate and ran out the door. Shocking I even snapped a photo, though if I hadn’t taken that extra 29 seconds to snap these cheesy wonders (the other 31 seconds of that minute involved a micro planer and an orange—a rapid attempt at ‘presentable’), you might not have believed me when I told you 1. I made them, 2. they are heavenly—I tried them myself, and 3. they won a prize.

Our kids’ school has frequent fund raising events, and this particular one asked guests to ‘please bring an appetizer or dessert.’ Since I had printed out this recipe just a week prior (lucky recipe, didn’t have to get in the back of the recipe line—it never made it into my binder), it was perfect timing for this event.

People tried the desserts and voted on favorites; these cheesecake bites won, and I was given a token bottle of wine.

Thank you Nicole, for this award-winning recipe:

Orange Mini Cheesecakes with Grand Marnier Cream

Crust:
1 C. graham cracker crumbs
2 T. brown sugar
1/3 stick melted butter

Filling:
1 8 oz. package cream cheese, room temperature
1/3 C. sour cream
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
1/3 C. sugar
finely grated zest of one orange

Topping:
1 C. heavy cream
1 T. Grand Marnier
2 T. powdered sugar

Oven to 375 degrees. In bowl, mix graham cracker crumbs, sugar and butter with a fork until well combined. Divide crumb mixture evenly between the 12 cups of your mini-cheesecake (I made 15 in a mini muffin) pan. Press crumbs firmly onto the bottom and partially up the sides of each cup; set aside. Blend sugar and orange zest in a mini food processor (optional). In electric mixer, blend softened cream cheese, sour cream, egg, sugar and orange zest. Spoon cream cheese mixture evenly into the twelve cups; bake for 14 minutes. Remove from oven and place on rack to cool for 20 minutes then carefully remove cheesecakes from pan and let cool completely on rack. Put cheesecakes in refrigerator and chill until ready to use. (Here is where I ran out of time): just before serving, make whipping cream. In cold bowl, whip cream, grand marnier and sugar until soft peaks form. Top mini cheesecakes with dollops of grand marnier cream and serve.

notes: I didn’t have a mini cheesecake tin, so I used a mini muffin tin. They still tasted fabulous, but I think they woulda been prettier coming out of an official cheesecake tin. Go look at the photo already!

Finally.

Do you do that too? Rip out a recipe, tuck it into your recipe binder or ‘try-this’ file, then promptly forget it? And I am talking years here.

This bean recipe has lived in the confines of my recipe pile, a bursting folder of potential table-worthy candidates that gained their way out of a magazine, off a website, or from a newspaper and got in line. It is a long line of recipes—waiting patiently or not—to be made in my kitchen. When will their turn come? How long must one wait?

Sometimes the line moves fast, sometimes it stands frozen for months on end. If your season passes, toss up those culinary hands and wait it out—your rotation has been stymied. And god forbid, the controller of this line (chef moi) might go through and actually clean out the recipe folder. Recipes vaporize, ushered permanently out of line, those carefully selected entrees and appetizers all of a sudden transported to the recycle bin—or worse, the fireplace (it has been cold in Seattle, after all).

But as with pruning a tree, cuts are necessary, and in the end it brings new life and better growth to that said tree. And I did clean out my file last month. And my recipe binder is all clean a pretty, more organized than it has been in years and guess what? The line is moving again.

Just last night I made celery bisque with stilton toasts—in line for at least 4 years—and a few nights before that, I made this bean dish (who must’ve cut in line, having only waited for 2 years)… though to be fair, the thought of this bean dish has been with me for 5 or 6 years: it all began at a restaurant in Seattle where they used to (the restaurant no longer exists) serve a blue cheese salad, lightly dressed, with a small pile of caramelized onions and a neighboring small scoop of chili beans. The spice and sweet set against the backdrop of pungent blue dressing and crisp salad greens still haunt me to this day.

This particular bean dish will not rebuild that memory—they are too sweet. Though it can stand in for this memory, the classic pot-luck favorite: pork and beans (aka baked beans). The ones that you used to eat next to burgers or sloppy joes. But these aren’t from the can. And my family loved this recipe; it will stay in my file.

There will be more beans in my future, a hunt for recipes to add to the waiting line, a spicy blend that will be belong with my favorite salad. Trust me, you will know when I have found ‘the one’; that bean recipe will march deftly to the front of the line, its name will be called to accompany its cheesy, caramelized and crispy friends to my kitchen. But until then:

Pork & Beans
6 ounces bacon (1/3 package)
1/4 cup white sugar
1 T cornstarch
1 tsp salt
1 pinch black pepper
1/3 cup distilled white vinegar
1/4 cup water
2 cans chili beans (or select 2-3 cans of beans, such as red kidney with pinto and black beans, etc.)

Cook bacon in skillet (meanwhile, open and drain beans); remove bacon and drain bacon grease (leave just 1-2 T of grease in skillet) . Mix sugar, cornstarch, salt, pepper in small bowl, then add to skillet. Add vinegar and water, cook and stir until boiling. Add drained beans. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 15-20 minutes.