Last night was another Restaurant Week night and once again, there was a beet salad choice, which I ordered. It was 3 slices of seared red and yellow beets with salt and oil and something else, and it was good. My childhood interactions with beets have been unhappy ones, with diced canned beets with the blood red runoff pooling on the plate and I just didn’t like the taste. Now, I’m discovering that beets can be good.
Last year I found out that beet greens were tasty, so I decided to grow a few. The picture you see was taken a few days ago in the back yard and well, though not exactly perky, the beets are doing fine. I think I planted those sometime in early fall, and kind of ignored the backyard since then. After experiencing great beet root salad, I might try my hand at it with the tiny beets in the pot there. I have eaten the roots, but only when thinning the pot and the roots were thin and not round and I cooked them up with the tops. Whatever flavor they might of had, probably got masked by the greens.
The great thing about growing my own stuff is that I can try to grow fancy stuff that I might not find at the market. So this year the plan includes red and golden beets. I order a seed for peach toned tomatoes, and I may try for the green and yellow zebra striped tomatoes again. There are some reddish bottomed spring onion things I’m going to try as well as some other interesting looking veggies.
Some of you have seen my yard, and you know it is nothing special. But from this small yard with so-so light and my bad habit of not watering things as I should, I’ve been able this winter to run out and grab some arugula for a pasta dish, dill for a gravlax, mint for garnish, and sage for a chicken dish. All within 3ft of my front door. Of course, I think the plants are benefiting from heat loss from the uninsulated parts of the house, and that could explain the bounty too.