My wandering Mind has another victim

The garden has finally been growing. We’ve had some great weather (thanks Mother Nature – AFTER school starts) and so the veggies are doing great.

I have three favorite vegetables that I like to plant and eat: cucumbers, tomatoes, and beets. I really do like all the vegetables I plant, but I adore those three. I adore them so much that I planted 10 Sweet 100’s, 20 beets and seven or eight cuke plants.

I’m always excited when I see the beets start to come in. When I was young, I only ate canned beets, which are good, but nothing compared to fresh beets from the garden.

I have found beets are a great and easy produce to plant. You can plant them in the early spring and have beets to pick from June until early October. They can handle cold weather (except severe freezing), which makes them a good long-season crop.

They're versatile. You can cook the beet (bulbous part) and the greens as well. Cook the beet greens as you would spinach. They're very sweet and yummy.

Beets are also an excellent source of folate, potassium, and manganese. There have been several studies that show that beets have anti-cancer benefits and fiber-related benefits. The combination of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties in beets makes this food a highly-likely candidate for risk reduction of many cancer types. Well, yeah for that!

FUN FACT:  An estimated 10-15% of all U.S. adults experience beeturia (a reddening of the urine) after consumption of beets in everyday amounts. I'm not one of the 10-15%; I can eat beets all day long and never pee any other color but what you’re supposed to. However, The Spouse IS one of those select groups who DO pee pink/red after eating beets. He has a funny story about his first discovery that he was one of those lucky ones, thinking that he was going to have to run to the emergency room after seeing red after using the bathroom.

Back to beets - this is how I cook my beets: washing the beet, I cut off both ends and then cut them up into quarters and put into medium glass pan, drizzle with olive oil and adding whatever spices I like (for sure pepper). Then in a 400 degree oven, roast them for about 30 minutes.

You can also steam them for about 15 minutes which will hold in more of the nutrients.

I was making some beets the other night for myself. I was excited to bite into the red, sweet beet rather than eating the cardboard pizza my kids were eating.

So I got my lovely beets all ready for the oven. I knew I had about 30 or 40 minutes to just walk outside and look at our one apple tree. I had been looking at an apple for the past week and wanted to see if it was ready to eat. I would be right back.

 

Here is some cooking hints for cooking beets:

 

Don't - whatever you do - DON'T put them in the oven and go out and pick apples, feed the goats the apples, wander down to the pond to look at the trout, walk up to the garden and turn on the water, eat cherry tomatoes, gnaw on a cob of corn, feed the dogs the slug-chewed zucchini, water the greenhouse tomato plants, stroll back to the barn, look for eggs in the coop, check on baby pigeons and feed them, ponder the night sky while sitting by the fire pit debating if you should start a fire, realize that it's a school night and kids have to get to bed, skip with the dogs and go back inside the house, and as you're walking past the oven and wonder why it's so hot, you open it, only to find your blackened, toasted, roasted, burned beets that you were going to have for dinner. Time? 3 1/2 hours later. I put them in at 6:30 pm and took them out at 9 pm.

 

 

Don't do that; they're not very tasty. Just a bit of advice.