Farm Boxes

Baked summer squash chips

Enjoy salmon with dried orange peel and rosemary

Kale with thin slices of garlic

The entire meal

So it's farm share season again and sometimes having a box full of produce is heaven, and other times it can be overwhelming. I love to cook, but this summer there are a few distractions. My kitchen and I kind of broke up when I decided to go back to school for my MFA in creative writing. Instead of looking up creative ways to make different veggies, I've been mashing up paragraphs I once thought made a fairly decent manuscript.

So what brought me back to my kitchen? Beets were the beginning of it all. Even if I was not feeling super creative when it came to food, I did realize that I didn't want to waste anything in the box. All green leafy things go fast in salads and stir-fries, but the beets were sitting in the fridge for the whole week. I dreaded them and we eventually roasted them with a potatoes and chicken. My kids found this fun because beets color everything red. We would end meals with kids covered in beet lipstick and blush. It was fine, but there had to be new ways to enjoy the red beasts in the fridge.

As we learned new ways to prepare beets, I realized that maybe I could learn to like a vegetable I once wished would disappear. Red veggies can be a lot of fun. So we got adventurous starting with a summer slaw. I grated only veggies from the box. This slaw was made of refreshing cucumbers, sweet beets, and juicy carrots. I did have to boil the beets in water first, but the rest of the slaw was raw. We all enjoyed this, so I went a little bit further.

Baking with beets can be interesting. I started with grating beets into a chocolate cake. As friends on my Facebook cake promised, beets added a special kind of moistness to the cake that is unique in comparison to the fact that adding carrots to a vanilla cake doesn't really change a lot to the overall texture of the yellow cake. Plus, when chocolate is involved, I most likely can be convinced to try the recipe. Well, that is kind of lying. I don't usually use just one recipe. I love to pick and choose from many different methods and then come up with something from scratch. Our beet cake was basically made of:

 2 1/2 cups of flour
 1/2 cup of melted chocolate chips
 (melted along with 1/4 a cup of butter)
 6 medium grated beets
 1/4 cup of sugar
 1 egg
 1 tablespoon of baking powder
Bake at 350 for about 1 hour in a standard loaf pan

If I were to make this again I would add 1/2 a cup of shredded coconut. I also tried to use very little sugar, but this would taste amazing with some cream cheese frosting.

However, not everyday is a cake baking day so what else could a person do with these beets to pretend they are not actually a strange looking vegetable? Make pink pancakes. There are tons of pictures of these if one just searches for pink pancakes. Some of the recipes are flour free. We kept things simple and added the beets to a standard family pancake recipe:

2 1/2 cups of freshly milled flour
2 1/2 cups of milk
4 eggs
1 tablespoon of baking powder
1 or 2 mashed bananas
(add a cup of shredded beets)
1 teaspoon of butter (for the griddle)

Our pink pancakes were actually more red.

Beet, Cucumber, and Carrot Slaw

Beet Chocolate Cake

Beet Pankcakes

The new challenge this month is figuring out what to do with all the different kinds of summer squash. As one can see at the top of this post, making the squash look like chips is helpful for my kids who have decided they don't really want to eat squash. I don't blame them when it appears in every other meal. We will be hiding it in things like squash pasta, pancakes, and other things that make it less squash-like.

As for time, well I will always want to be working on several things at once. Right now I should being driving to pick up something to add to our veggies tonight. As one can see, I'm still super torn between writing and cooking. Reconnecting with my kitchen might take a little bit more time, but there are plenty of new creations to find. Maybe I can try to work on two things at once, right? Cook, write, cook...