Tag Archives: garlic

262/365. We Got The Beet! (TM).

262/365. We Got The Beet! (TM). I.

i am so loving the spicy beets with grassmilk yogurt and caraway sauce i made yesterday. i took it to work and got generally positive reviews and quite a few usage suggestions.

it totally works as a topping for a burger ( in this case, an olive and swiss ). and yes, you can also dunk it in fries.

although it can be eaten and enjoyed all by itself as a savory yogurt, it’s really a multifunctional, vaguely mediterranean, spicy sauce analogous to sriracha sauce.

as a brand manager, i think it needs an identity more interesting than “spicy beets with grassmilk yogurt and caraway sauce”, befitting of its festive red color and spicy attitude. how about “We Got The Beet!”? i guess i should look into what it would take 262/365. We Got The Beet! (TM). II.

the possibilities are endless. cut it with some olive oil for a spicy beet yogurt vinaigrette. it was lovely on a roasted beet salad with feta cheese and toasted walnuts.

261/365. recipe: spicy pureed beets with grassmilk yogurt and caraway.

261/365. recipe: spicy pureed beets with grassmilk yogurt and caraway.

i found this puréed beets with yogurt and caraway by martha rose schulman and thought i’d give it a try with organic valley’s new 100% grass-fed, cream on top grassmilk yogurt.

i wasn’t sure what to expect, but it’s really, really good! i think it works all by itself as a savory/spicy yogurt but would also pair well with lamp or pork as a condiment in addition to eating with warm pita bread as martha rose schulman suggests.

if you end up making let me know what you think and if you ate it standalone or as a condiment.

don’t skip the ground caraway! it really brings in unique element to the recipe.

ingredients
1 ½ pounds beets (4 medium), roasted beets
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 cup plain grassmilk yogurt
1 tablespoon agave syrup or light corn syrup
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon ground caraway seeds
⅛ to ¼ teaspoon cayenne, to taste
Salt to taste

directions
– preheat oven to 350F
– roast beets for about an hour
– peel beets, cut into wedges and let cool
– crush and finely chop garlic
– add beets and garlic together in blender and pulse to chop beets into smaller chunks
– add yogurt and puree until smooth
– add agave nectar or light corn syrup, olive oil, ground caraway, cayenne and salt to taste.
– continue to blend until well mixed.

enjoy!

day 3052: preparing seed garlic for a slightly smaller, small mountain of garlic.

day 3052: preparing seed garlic for a slightly smaller, small mountain of garlic. I.

regular readers might recall we’ve been planting and harvesting a small mountain of garlic for several years now. we usually plant around 200 cloves around this time of year in our lovely cropp crop.

it turns out that 200 head of garlic is, well, way too much for a family of three even after you factor in giving away loads of it to friends and family and what we need for seed every year. so this year, we’re scaling back and “only” planting 80 cloves in our home garden.

as always, odin is a super helper and thoroughly getting his hands dirty preparing the garlic and planting the seed.

day 3052: preparing seed garlic for a slightly smaller, small mountain of garlic. II.

experts will tell you the middle of november is way too late to plant garlic, but we’ve never had any problems because we always seem to get lucky with an unseasonably warm streak of weather. this year was no exception, right when we thought we might be too late, we got a nice warm streak of weather with predictions of gentle rain.

perfect ( excepting for what the trend might portend in terms of global warming )!

on waking, once again, to a bat in the house!

on waking, once again, to a bat in the house! I.

there’s nothing quite like waking up to the swoosh! swoosh! of a bat flying around your bedroom and not too far from your head! it’s been 6 years since we’ve had any bats in the living space of our home ( i have to qualify that statement because there are plenty of bats we can hear crawling around the walls from time to time they just don’t come on the living space anymore ), and while i love bats and the fact that they can eat thousands of insects an hour, i certainly don’t love them flying around in the house while we’re sleeping!

odin woke us up when he heard it and we calmly shut the bedroom door after the bat flew out and slept relatively soundly together while the bat presumably tried to find its way out. we left the front door open to our enclosed porch and luckily it was smart enough to find a sleeping spot in a corner of the porch since that makes removal a lot less traumatic for everyone involved. not nets or whatnot required, we just left the porch door open and he flew out the next evening after waking up from his slumber.

i’m not expert enough to tell if he’s a little brown bat or a juvenile big brown bat, but either way i hope he stays out of our house and safe now that the deadly white nose syndrome that’s decimating bat populations has been spotted thirty miles from wisconsin.

on waking, once again, to a bat in the house! II.

at least we know for sure he’s not a vampire since he chose to sleep in the space where there was 200 head of garlic drying ( he’s the little brown blob up in the corner )!

i wrote about some of run-ins with bats 6 years ago and was amused to take a trip down memory lane after discovering this bat. feel free to check out, “Mr. Big Brown Bat!”, “Invasion of The Big Brown Bats! or could we be any more stupider?”, “bats are supposed to stay in the belfry!” ( wherein i rescue a bat from the toilet ), “it’s time for another exciting round of What Would You Do?”, “O RLY?” and “bats be gone?”

garlic harvest!

garlic harvest!

thanks to kris’ hard work ( i was working hard on other ice creamy things! ), our fine looking cropp garlic crop is now harvested and hanging on our front porch to dry ( we thought the galaxie didn’t need vampire protection this year ).

i think you might be able to smell garlic all the way down the block.

overall, the harvest is about the same as the small mountain we got last year – around 200 head – though the heads are, on average, a titch smaller. maybe we shouldn’t have planted in the same spot two years on a row? maybe we should have amended the soil with compost before planting?

either way, they’re plenty big for seed for the next planting in november and we’ll have more than enough left over to supply us with garlic for the whole year, and i’m sure we’ll give away a bunch to friends and family who don’t have the means to grow their own.