SOME OF YOU ARE BEET HATERS. IS IT BECAUSE THEY STAIN YOUR FINGERS, POSSIBLY YOUR URINE? IS IT BECAUSE THEY TASTE LIKE THE GOODNESS OF THE EARTH? WELL, WHATEVER YOUR REASON, YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

I know a lot of people dislike specific foods. Beets seem to be one of the most widely disliked root vegetables among my circle of people. My family loves them, though. Mostly we enjoy them in as sweet tangy pickled veggie, usually canned. Although I have not successfully gotten the hang of growing enough food to preserve, yet, I was excited to pick my first beets of the year a couple of months ago.

The weather changed fast which kicked in to gear the pest pressure. The wild purple garlic I'd transplanted from the orchard was starting to form scapes. The kale was just starting to make medium sized leaves. I was itching to cook homegrown produce before the heat and bugs beet me to it. Besides, with the heat going into the upper 80s-90s, I wanted to make room for other plants.

I'm a decent cook, unless it's cookies. I suck at making cookies. I can cook a lot of things from scratch, usually without a recipe. I owe this skill to working many years in the food industry and ritualistically watching Cook's Country on PBS. Truthfully, though, I keep things very simple most of the time.

I like the taste of vegetables. Heck, there are times I shovel lettuce in my pie hole without any dressing! Usually I prep ingredients a day or two in advance, cook enough for freezer leftovers, and eat a lot of no cook foods such as carrots with ranch, celery with peanut butter, deli ham with cheddar cheese. I call it toddler food.

The truth is that as much as I love cooking, it's too difficult to do a few times a day, everyday. Sometimes I have a good day where I get to cook an entire meal. As I mentioned already, cooking the first produce from the no dig garden bed was special. It was extra special because I hadn't really cooked in months. Anyway, this was the meal I made with my first pickings from the (supposedly) Spring garden, 2018.

Ingredients:

cylindra beets
young kale
wild purple garlic scapes
garlic herb organic chicken breasts
avocado oil
agave
balsamic vinegar
pink Himalayan sea salt

These are the scapes. They are delicious. The entire garlic plant is edible. I removed these scapes because I wanted the plants to keep putting energy into forming the garlic bulbs but also wanted to eat some of the garlic. They are best picked while the entire scape is still pliable. You can still use them once they've grown more, but they become woody. If you wait until they are woody, throw them in stock for flavor, then strain them out.

You probably already know that the entire beet plant is also edible. For those of you who don't like the taste of the beet root, try sautéing the greens. Remove the stem since it has the same strong flavor as the root. You can eat the greens raw in salads, as well. Here I have just rough cut them because as they cook, they shrink. I like cooking to the texture between canned spinach and frozen spinach. Not mushy, but not chewy, either.

This was my first year growing the Cylindra beets I bought from BAKER CREEK HEIRLOOM SEEDS. They are long fat roots which are easier to slice than traditional spherical beets most people are familiar with. I really enjoyed that because the globe shaped beets are annoying to slice. These were pretty on the inside, as well. I'll definitely be growing them again. Probably very soon as it's almost fall garden planting time.

(One more thing about beets. There are many kinds of beets. For those of you who absolutely hate beets, I challenge you to try different varieties. There are sugar beets that are so sweet they are used to make beet sugar. Self explanatory name. There are golden beets in which some varieties have a less earthy flavor than the deep red ones. There are beets which are white with red stripes. There are all kinds of beets and I bet you stopped at the first bite of a deep red globe beet. They are an easy vegetable to grow. They preserve well by canning and freezing, or even just staying in a root cellar for weeks. Possibly months if stored properly. It's a vegetable worth giving another shot since there are so many types and so many benefits)

I'd picked up a nice fresh package of garlic herb marinated organic chicken breast. Truth is organic food is too expensive for me so when I find it on sale, I go for it. The marinated meats aren't usually my first choice. As I said earlier, simple plain food is tasty enough for me. I've found some marinated meats to be too strongly seasoned. To avoid that with this chicken I rinsed the marinade off really well, then dried the pieces, which is what you see in the above picture.

There wasn't much fat so I left it on. Between the avocado oil and the chicken grease, that's all I needed to sauté the greens.

The first thing I started to cook was the beets. I wanted them fork tender which can take a while, just like other root vegetables. I knew by the time these were done, the chicken and greens would be finished. All I did was cover them with water then bring them to a low boil.

They took about 20 minutes to get to the tenderness we like. One thing some people do that I didn't was to drain and replace the water a few times while cooking to get some of that deep pigment a little less strong. I didn't which is probably why I was peeing red for a day. That's okay by me.

If you don't drain it while you cook it you get a very dark red pigment that you could use for a ton of things, such as dying hardboiled eggs or fabric. You can pitch it on the compost pile, too. I haven't tried this but I imagine you could dehydrate the liquid then grind it up for beet powder. It's not uncommon that it's used to color other foods. Why buy red40 when you can grow beets?

Once they were finished, they were moved off the heat, drained, and a little bit of agave and balsamic vinegar was added. The sweetness of the agave mellows out the vinegar a bit. We use agave because it has a low glycemic index. The body still recognizes it as a sugar, but it doesn't create the same glucose roller coaster that refined sugars do. I don't know about you but having wild sugar swings is pretty crappy to experience.

My favorite fat to cook with is Ghee, otherwise known as clarified butter. It's not good for me to have too much animal fats, though, so I primarily use avocado oil now. With a little salt, it tastes very similar to salted butter. I added enough to cover the bottom of my wok, then preheated it before adding the chicken. You want your food to sizzle when you put it in the oil. One way to check to see if the pan is preheated enough is to add a drop of water. You do want to be careful not to over heat the pan unless you enjoy getting a scalding hot shower of oil splatter. Cooking in a wok requires high heat but what I do is preheat the pan on medium before I put the food in, then turn it up to high.

The time it takes to wok stirfry is short. It took maybe 6 minutes to brown the chicken on all sides.

I wait until I can see the part of the meat touching the pan change in color before I start stirring. Basically, I wait until it looks half cooked, or cooked well on one side. That's also when I added the flower tips of the scapes to the wok. They are more delicate than garlic cloves so I didn't want to add them first, like you would normally do cooking with garlic. Think of them like a green onion that tastes like garlic. A stronger garlic flavor than garlic chives. I suppose it wasn't necessary to cook with them since the chicken was already marinated with garlic, but I wanted to cook with them, so they went in. I also didn't salt although with unseasoned meat, this would be the stage that I toss in a pinch of salt.

After the chicken was cooked all the way through, it was removed from the pan to rest while cooking the greens.

After the chicken was removed, the chicken grease and avocado oil were enough liquid to start sautéing the vegetables. You don't need too much liquid, but a little will help cook the greens faster on high heat without burning them.

Because the beet stems require more time to cook they went in first for a few minutes. One of the things that makes a great cook is tasting as you cook. This gives you an idea if something needs more seasoning and is the texture/doneness you want.

After the beet stems were fork tender and taste tested, the greens were thrown in along with a pinch of salt. The salt isn't just for taste. It helps pull out the juices of the leaves which makes sautéing the beet greens, kale, and rest of the garlic scapes go very fast.

I like my stir-fried greens to be cooked well but not cooked so long they are mushy. Greens aren't necessarily the most beautiful looking sides but the pop of red beet stems livens it up.

All that was left to do was plate it up and eat it up. It was a fun meal to prepare and tasted doubly delicious because I grew the veggies.

That's all for now... If you found this post enjoyable, please consider upvoting, resteeming, following, and commenting! Thank you kindly for reading...

ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHT 2018 BY ME, @phedizzle. Hope you enjoyed them!

Here are previous posts of mine:

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(Created by @soulturtle)

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WHAT'S FOR DINNER? BEETS ME! FIRST GARDEN HARVEST AND RECIPE

SOME OF YOU ARE BEET HATERS. IS IT BECAUSE THEY STAIN YOUR FINGERS, POSSIBLY YOUR URINE? IS IT BECAUSE THEY TASTE LIKE THE GOODNESS OF THE EARTH? WELL, WHATEVER YOUR REASON, YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

Ingredients:

There wasn't much fat so I left it on. Between the avocado oil and the chicken grease, that's all I needed to sauté the greens.

The first thing I started to cook was the beets. I wanted them fork tender which can take a while, just like other root vegetables. I knew by the time these were done, the chicken and greens would be finished. All I did was cover them with water then bring them to a low boil.

They took about 20 minutes to get to the tenderness we like. One thing some people do that I didn't was to drain and replace the water a few times while cooking to get some of that deep pigment a little less strong. I didn't which is probably why I was peeing red for a day. That's okay by me.

The time it takes to wok stirfry is short. It took maybe 6 minutes to brown the chicken on all sides.

After the chicken was cooked all the way through, it was removed from the pan to rest while cooking the greens.

After the chicken was removed, the chicken grease and avocado oil were enough liquid to start sautéing the vegetables. You don't need too much liquid, but a little will help cook the greens faster on high heat without burning them.

Because the beet stems require more time to cook they went in first for a few minutes. One of the things that makes a great cook is tasting as you cook. This gives you an idea if something needs more seasoning and is the texture/doneness you want.

After the beet stems were fork tender and taste tested, the greens were thrown in along with a pinch of salt. The salt isn't just for taste. It helps pull out the juices of the leaves which makes sautéing the beet greens, kale, and rest of the garlic scapes go very fast.

I like my stir-fried greens to be cooked well but not cooked so long they are mushy. Greens aren't necessarily the most beautiful looking sides but the pop of red beet stems livens it up.

All that was left to do was plate it up and eat it up. It was a fun meal to prepare and tasted doubly delicious because I grew the veggies.

That's all for now... If you found this post enjoyable, please consider upvoting, resteeming, following, and commenting! Thank you kindly for reading...

ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHT 2018 BY ME, @phedizzle. Hope you enjoyed them!

Here are previous posts of mine:

STORIES:

2011 GARDEN:

RECIPES:

POEMS:

PLANTS AND ANIMALS-EDUCATIONAL:

WALK ALONG WITH ME:

2018:

CONTESTS/REVIEWS

Phedizzle signature created by @bembelmaniac

(Created by @soulturtle)

So come say hello in the following Discord chat rooms: