Garden: Actual Final Photo of Garden 2016

At the very end of December I harvested two last plants from our side garden.  The kale was still in good shape and made some wonderful kale chips.  Next year I will grow more kale for sure and plan to pick even longer.  If I keep the snow from the kale, it will last a long time, I am certain since we had multiple days below zero.

Garden Harvest: Roasted Beets

Beets are not my favorite vegetables.  They are edible however, and are supposed to be very good for you.  SO...when I was given a bunch of beets, I decided to roast some of them.  In the back of my mind I remember making some wonderful roasted beets many years ago when dear friends asked us to use their CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) shares when they were going to be gone for half the summer.  That particular CSA hostess often included recipes, especially for vegetables that were lesser well-known.  She gave us a recipe for roasted beets, roasted in the (well-scrubbed) skins.  They were so very good.  Just not good enough for me to plant beets in our garden yet.  If I find the recipe and it still is as good as I remember, perhaps beets will be in the garden next year.

This is what I did with the beets:

Scrubbed 5 large beets.  Cut off the tops and the root ends.  Cut the beets in half then sliced into 1/2 inch slices then sliced the other direction as well.

Put the beet chunks in a 3-quart bowl.

Beets in 3-quart bowl

Added to the bowl:
3 Tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Mixed all this together well (I used my hands, but you could use a rubber spatula or long-handled wooden spoon.  I enjoyed licking the salt-pepper-and-thyme-y goodness off my fingers.)

Preheated the oven to 400 degrees F.

Beets on pan and ready to roast

Put the prepared beets on a large rimmed baking pan, in this case a half-sheet pan.  Spread the beets around so they were in one layer.  Cooked for 30 minutes.  Removed from oven and stirred well then returned to oven for another 30 minutes of cooking.  Removed from oven again and let sit a few minutes to cool.

Roasted beets cooling

They were more than edible!  Not fantastic as in feeling like I had died-and-gone-to-Heaven good, but very much eat-able.  Based on how these taste, I may try to turn some of them into borscht soup.  My last effort in the borscht department was such a disaster taste-wise that I thought I would never make it again.  Just today I saw a recipe that looks really good.  It uses sauercraut!  What can go wrong with sauercraut?!

Garden Harvest: Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

We had about a quart of cherry tomatoes that I did not want to eat in salads or just plain.  What to do?  What to do?  Why not try roasting them?  Lots of vegetables taste wonderful roasted, even if they are not so hot raw or cooked other ways.  I repeat:  why not try roasting them?

This is what I did:

Washed the cherry tomatoes after removing a few stems.

Cut the tomatoes in half an put in a large bowl.

Poured a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil over them and swished the bowl around to connect the tomatoes to the oil.

Sprinkled on 1 teaspoon granulated onions and garlic (50/50 mixture I had made to take on vacation and which needed to be used up), 1 teaspoon Italian herb seasoning--oregano, basil, etc.  (NOT Italian salad dressing mix), and 1/2 teaspoon of coarse Kosher salt.  Mixed well by sloshing the bowl around a bit to get the seasonings on all the tomato parts.

Roasted Tomatoes showing the caramelizing.

Put tomatoes on a rimmed baking sheet that has been covered by parchment paper.  There will probably be a little some delicious "juice" in the bowl.  That can be used to flavor some other vegetable dish.

Place the pan in a preheated 350 degree F. oven for 45 minutes or so.

They will be nicely caramelized and taste really delicious.