You Just Can't BEET it!

I walked out to the garden and walked down the rows looking for a vegetable or two to cook as a side dish for some homemade chicken and dumplings that Tricia was working on preparing in the kitchen. Tricia likes a variety of colors on the plate to liven things up.  I've read somewhere that vegetables with lots of color are loaded with nutrition.

Well, I think I found just the thing to meet the color requirement on a row smack dab in the middle of the garden - Bull's Blood Beets!  We have a few beets on the row that were the perfect 'pulling size,' so I pulled a couple beets from the ground. Bull's Blood beets get their name from the rich, dark red color of the beet leaves.

Bull's Blood Beets

We have had lots of rain, so the beets came up easy from the moist soil. Just a gentle tug brought the beet roots out of the soil and ready to bring inside and prepare.

Beet roots

While walking back to the house, I also broke off some purple cauliflower and some Swiss Chard. How's that for some color?  The wife was pleased!  The colors were so striking that I laid down the produce on a bed of turnips I have growing to show the contrast of the colors.  Just look at the brilliant beauty of tonight's vegetable side dish.

A palette of colors for our palates

I took them inside and cut the greens (in this case, reds) off the beet roots.

Then I got the potato peeler and peeled the skins off the roots.  Handling them turned my hands red. Now normally I feed the leaves and stems and beet pulp to the cows, but not today.  I have something else in store for the beet greens.

I sliced and quartered the beet roots on a cutting board.  This should make them cook a little faster.

Bull's Blood beets sliced and quartered

Then I got on the Internet and found just what I was looking for: This Recipe from www.allrecipes.com.  Roasted Beets and Sauteed Beet Greens.  It is a simple dish to prep and the only change that we made to it was that we substituted butter instead of olive oil.  I preheated the oven to 350 degrees, put the cut up beets in a roasting dish, poured 2 Tablespoons melted butter over them and tossed them around so that the butter coated the beets.  I put them in the oven and set the timer for 45 minutes.

Butter is Better

When the beets were almost done, I put 2 Tablespoons butter, 2 cloves of minced garlic, and 2 tablespoons of chopped Purple Onion in a cast iron skillet and let them get all happy.

This smells so good!

Then (sorry cows), I put the beet greens that I had torn in pieces into the skillet.  I will admit that I brought the stems out for the cows to eat, but I'm sure that they were disappointed to not get the whole thing.

I stirred them while they cooked and once they withered, I added some sea salt and criolla sella ground pepper and mixed it all in.

Ready to eat!

By that time, the buzzer went off on the oven and we removed the roasted beets and place them atop the bed of sauteed beet greens in my plate alongside the green cauliflower.  We saved the purple cauliflower for another day and instead cooked some green cauliflower that I had picked a day earlier.

A delicious vegetable side dish

I served a bowl of Chicken and Dumplings and I was going to take a picture of that too, but by the time I thought of it, they were all gone.  The beets and beet greens were delicious.  The flavors of the garlic, onion and butter were great, but didn't overpower the great tasting greens.  This Allrecipes recipe was fantastic and will be added into our rotation.  The recipe says to add some red wine vinegar to the top of the greens.  We didn't do that, but I'm sure it would have been good.  The cows' loss was definitely our gain.