Food Friday: What I Learned!

After the Vegetable Smoothie debacle yesterday I decided to leave out future beet parts from them.  The bunch had four beets, plus the greens attached.  Since I could not bear to toss them out I decided to cook them up somehow.  I remember my father eating beet greens with vinegar on them, then uplifting the bowl and draining the vinegar into his mouth.  I am not sure I will go that route, but I did steam the beet greens. They are now waiting in the refrigerator for me to eat them tonight.  I am not even going to TRY to offer them to Dear One.  Why plague the poor guy?!

Now there were the four beets, well, three and three-quarters beets...remember the quarter beet in the benighted vegetable smoothie...What to do with them. Hmmm. 

What I did with them was scrubbed the rest of them then cut them into quarters, pole to pole; put them in a large bowl with about 2 teaspoons olive oil; mixed them until there was oil on all surfaces; then sprinkled in some coarse Kosher salt and stirred again.  I roasted them for 45 minutes at 400 degrees F.  They were not quite done when we had to leave for the office so I just shut them off and left them in the oven, hoping the residual heat would finish cooking them.

Fast forward ten hours.  We arrived home from the office but I had gotten a bug to go to a hardware store to get some plexi-glass sheeting cut for watercolor paper support.  When I found an Ace Hardware store I noticed it was right next door to a Tienda Mexicana.  This was a sign!  I HAD to go. 

So I left Dear One at home to shift for himself and headed out.  I had a couple other stops in my mind, not that I shared that news widely, so I hoped he would eat up the leftover lasagna in the refrigerator.

The hardware store trip was way more successful than I had imagined and the Tienda Mexicana adventure came out really well. I walked out of the store with a few items (this had been an assignment for last week from my Spanish tutor which I had not completed for some reason, mostly gutlessness, but now it is done. I might go back and try again, and talk and listen a little more...).

When I got home Dear One met me in the kitchen doorway and apologized for turning on the oven without looking.  May I say, the beets were ready to eat?!  Actually, they were fabulous.  Roasting beets is the best way to ingest that important food.  This is a good thing to learn.

Another thing I learned this week is that it is possible to "over-process" flax seeds when you are turning them into flax seed meal.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when I opened the container and found that rather than flax seed meal, it was almost flax seed butter.  May I say that this has not stopped me from using it in smoothies and in the best oatmeal bowl ever.  It just is not as pleasant...

Well, back to work!