Success is Tasty

Harvested (and consumed five minutes later), April 27th, 2010

Beets are Magical

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets

Maybe it is a testament to my Slovak heritage, but I love beets. Even canned beets piled on my salad bar plate make me happy, I am no beet snob. Yes, I recognize the fact that fresh roasted beets with a drizzle of olive oil are much more tasty than cracking open the can, but I will take beets in any form. Even in ravioli, which A prepared for Valentines Day for me from this recipe.

If beets give me my seriousness, then it is no wonder that I have been told that I lack a sense of humor (and, I will admit to being stonyfaced during most popular comedies, and only laughing during the most obscure references on Family Guy episodes). I have always consumed beets with gusto, even when I was little and supposed to wrinkle my nose and pitch a fit at the dinner table, I always ate the beets, and asked for more. I was the twenty-something college student with two jars of beets in her basement apartment refrigerator, while my peers only stocked cheap beer and ketchup.

Rumor has it that the Greeks offered beet greens to the god Apollo on a silver platter at the temple of Delphi, but I will take my chances with angering the Gods, and keep these all for myself.

Ahh.The Irony

It has been so cold today, and we suffered through planting the rest of the green onions into the garden as the wind blew and I wore A’s coat. With numb fingers, we transplanted the summery tomatoes and peppers into peat pots. Now we wait.

More, More, More

Planted more lettuce today, the mixed greens seem to be doing well. The other square, mesclun mix (not to be pronounced mescaline, which
A likes to point out that I sometimes do, and therefore am inadvertently talking about some trippy drug that has connotations of stumbling around the desert and licking a frog and such), did not fair well in the above average heat, and lack of attention caused by our leaving town for a few days. We decided to try again to see if it was the seeds, the weather, or us that is the problem. My vote is the seeds, A votes for weather.

A Shovel-Ready Project

Unlike the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that seems to bind up every government project with red tape, we truly are ready to plant in the garden. This week, we planted two squares of lettuce before we left town. The weather was beautiful, and the bed looked so bare, we could not help ourselves. Then, today, upon returning home, we planted radishes and carrots (the countdown to bread slathered with butter and radishes and salt has begun) We transplanted more herbs from the tiny cell growing tray to larger peat pots.

A Better Basket

Today, instead of an Easter basket filled with candy that disappears so quickly, only to reappear as extra pounds of belly fat, we started the tomatoes, peppers and “my” peas outside in a container. This will give us a harvest that lasts much longer than a bag of Gene and Boots jelly beans (although, I admit, I ate a few of those for nostalgia’s sake and so did A. I think my mom slipped him an extra bag as we were leaving, but I cannot be sure).

Seeds started indoors this weekend:

Black Krim Tomatoes
Amish Paste Tomatoes
San Marzano Tomatoes
Caramelo Tomatoes
Bananarama Banana Peppers (huge, perfect for stuffing!)