Tag Archives: vegetables

Grill those beets!

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Consider this the world’s shortest list of ingredients next to the recipe for making toast: grilled beets. While dh and ds were at the grocery store yesterday, apparently ds pointed THE ALMIGHTY FINGER OF THE PRESCHOOLER at beets, and dh happily obliged. After all, when your small child is pointing to a vegetable that he’s actually likely to eat, you often want to pounce on that with all of the joy and verve of a tween offered a chance to see Justin Bieber reading the part of Edward in a table read of “Breaking Dawn: part 2”. (Maybe minus all the angsty swoon…but you get the point.)

The pair of ’em picked out a lovely set of golden and red beets. Then dh prepped ’em and put ’em on the grill. Y NO CAN HAS PIC? Sorry, didn’t think to take one, but suffice to say that they were lovely. The golden beets have this terrific yellowish-orangy hue, and the red beets have a fantastic reddish purple color that just lights up a plate. This recipe yields  the same outcome as oven roasting, only you don’t have to bother turning on your oven (yeay!). DH also noted that he finds this method of peeling beets far easier than what I do – using a peeler on them when they’re raw so I can chop peeled beets before roasting them in the oven.

Pointing back to my question about how to have things that help relieve some of the monotony of one-night dinners and the related follow-up post by my friend Local Kitchen, we did have extra beets at the end of the meal, even with ds clamoring for a third serving. What do you do with said leftover beets? WHATEVER YOU WANT. The suggestions I had for dh were either to cut them up and toss them in with some leftover couscous for a simple lunch option or cut them up and add them to the salads he takes to work every day. Either way, they’re yummy and totally worth having. And, if you have a grill, they’re easy to prepare. Also, waste not, want not: this recipe also yields a bunchload of beet greens. USE THOSE BABIES. Make a salad out of ’em, wilt ’em in a pan before serving immediately…find a use for ’em!

I will also point out that when your 2-1/2 year old son decides to wipe purple beety hands on his white t-shirt, baby wipes appear to take out most of the stain. *cough*

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 1 hour

Serves: 3-5 (depends on your beet-lovin’ level)

Ingredients

1 bunch golden beets

1 bunch red beets

Make it Happen

1. Start your grill and aim for about medium-level (indirect) heat. When ready, this should be up in the 450F range.

2. Trim off the beet greens and scrub each beet bulb clean.

3. Wrap each beet bulb in aluminum foil; place the foil-wrapped beets on the grill and close the grill cover.

4. Turn the beets every 15 minutes until at desired tenderness, approximately 1 hour for medium/large beets (3″ or so in diameter), slightly less for small beets (2″ diameter or thereabouts).

5. Remove the foil and then carefully remove the beet skin; this is most easily done by rubbing the beet in a paper towel, which should fairly well slough off the skin.

6. Either serve whole or chop into bite-sized pieces and serve.

Adventures in CSA (winter week 1): value shift

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First off, I know this is a long-delayed post. Sorry. Between being distracted by all that was going on with Penn State (my alma mater) and work and the kids and…just about everything else…by the time I got time to myself, I had just enough energy to play Angry Birds, and writing was just not in the cards.

Second, here’s where things start to downshift some in terms of value, and I’m starting to see that. We’ve been thrown off some in the last few weeks thank to a blizzard prompting a clean-out of some portions of the fridge, appointments that have screwed up our dinner planning…all kinds of things. And this is the big issue that I have with the fresh ingredients that you get from a CSA: what are you supposed to do when you have diminishing time to prepare ingredients from scratch? So, our use of the CSA hasn’t been as high as it could’ve been lately. And this is where things get to be lower value for us, because we’re not getting the use of the items the way we should (our fault) and we’re not saving a ton of money due to the type of items that are included.

This hasn’t soured me on the idea of the CSA, but it does make me wonder whether I would go in on a winter share again.

Here’s the breakdown on the prices for week 1’s box:

Winter CSA Week 1
Weight
(lb)		 Grocery Store Unit Price
(per lb)		 Grocery Store Total Item Cost
Purple Kale* 0.85 $1.29 $1.10
Bok Choi 3.25 $1.29 $4.19
Comice Pears 0.87 $2.99 $2.59
Carrots 1.51 $0.99 $1.49
Red Potatoes 1.09 $1.49 $1.62
Parsnips 0.81 $2.49 $2.02
Butternut Squash 2.54 $0.79 $2.01
Yukon Gold Potatoes 0.96 $0.99 $0.95
Macintosh Apples 2.57 $1.19 $3.06
Yellow Onion 0.30 $1.49 $0.44
Grocery Store Total Cost $19.48
Winter CSA Week 1 Savings (Deficit) ($0.52)
Notes:
* Items were not available; closest equivalent was used.

Some of the lower financial value has to be in the items that are included; potatoes, apples, etc. tend to be less expensive items. Amusingly, carrots are the only item that I’ve been the price stay static at $0.99/lb throughout the entire run of the fall CSA and thus far through the winter CSA. Given how other things seems to shift, I wonder why it is that carrots remain virtually fixed in place, price-wise?

I’m wondering whether others find that their winter CSA programs are worth what they put into them, or if it’s just ours that seems to be of lower financial value. It may also be where we are – what you can get in a box in Southern New England during the late fall and early winter may just be stuff that’s less expensive than what you can get in the Southwest or Southeast?

CSA Cleanout Crock Pot Pork Tenderloin

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This one is a recipe of necessity: my CSA veggie boxes have taken over the fridge! The counters, the fridge…everywhere I look there are veggies that need a home: in our BELLEHS. It also didn’t help that I spent part of the evening Sunday night trying to figure out which potatoes survived the house turning into a fridge for a few days (the answer: NOT the new potatoes or the red potatoes, sadly). We also have a week coming up where generating leftovers is a bad idea.

Thus, many of the items in this dish came from our CSA veggie boxes, specifically: the onions, sweet potatoes, apples, carrots and honey. The bulk of the prep time in this dish, well – ALL of the prep time, really, came from the chopping that takes up steps 1-5, below. The rest of it is about a 5 minute process. So, if you want to do any of this the night before, I’d recommend going for it.

We have large plastic containers in our house for just such a reason – so the onions, sweet potatoes, shallots and apples were all prepped the night before. TIRED ME, I put the apples on the top of the container with the sweet potatoes. Were I being smart, the apples would’ve gone on the bottom of the container so that I could’ve just upended the thing right into the crock pot and had them in the order I wanted. (I prefer to put onions and the root veggies at the bottom of the crock pot so that they can take the bulk of the heat – they tend to stand that much better than, say, apples, which would just turn straight into applesauce.)

The carrots were cut up in the morning too, only because I was out of energy by the time I was done with a long day that I capped off with prepping onions, potatoes, shallots and apples for the next morning. And, really, if your fear is that the apples might turn brown as they oxidize: feel free to let go of that fear. First, if you have the lid on your container fairly tight, that problem may be minimized. Second, if they’re going in the crock pot, you’ll never notice whether they turned brown overnight or not.

This dish came out sweet and yummy. We didn’t pair it with a starch, but you certainly could serve this with some rice or couscous. The sauce is plentiful and light in nature, and it lends a nice sweetness to the whole thing. Because we let it go for longer than the required cook time, the pork just fell apart on us (never a bad thing), and both the sweet potatoes and apples just fell apart on the tongue. Again, this is a good problem to have.

I would say that this is a recipe that could easily be done with chicken instead of pork BUT I would then adjust the cook time down to 6-8 hrs.

 

CSA Cleanout Crock Pot Pork Tenderloin

Porktastic!

Prep Time: 30-40 min
Cooking Time: 8-10 hrs on LOW
Serves: 4

Ingredients
2 small (or 1 large) yellow onions
2 large sweet potatoes
1 shallot
5 medium empire apples
6 medium/large carrots
1-1/2 lbs pork tenderloin
14-1/2 oz can low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup apple juice
2 Tb cider vinegar
2 Tb wildflower honey
1 Tb brown sugar

Make it Happen
1. Peel and thinly slice the onion(s); place in the bottom of a 5qt oval crock pot in a single layer. They should cover the majority of the bottom of the crock pot.

2. Wash and chop the sweet potatoes into pieces no more than about 1/2″ thick and 1″ wide. Place the sweet potatoes in the crock pot.

3. Peel and mince the shallot. Sprinkle about one-third of the shallot on top of the sweet potatoes.

4. Peel the carrots and remove the ends; chop into small rounds, no more than about 1/3″ thick. Place in the crock pot. Sprinkle about one-third of the shallots on top of the carrots.

5. Wash the apples; slice in half, remove the core and then cut the apples into roughly 12 slices. Place the apples in the crock pot; sprinkle the remaining shallots on top of the apples.

6. Place the pork tenderloin on top of the apples. Pour the broth on top of the tenderloin and pour around it, on top of the apples and veggies.

7. In a measuring cup, pour the apple juice and the cider vinegar; pour this combination on top of the tenderloin and then around it, on top of the apples and veggies.

8. Drizzle the honey on top of the tenderloin, using either the flat of the spoon or a brush to coat the top of the tenderloin evenly with the honey.

9. Sprinkle brown sugar on top of the tenderloin.

10. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hrs.

11. Remove pork from crock pot and cut into 1/2″ thick pieces before serving with veggies, apples & sauce.