Anarcho-Southern Garden-Fresh Borscht

Fall beets are busting out around here, and so my kitchen is full of beet-derived concoctions.

Yesterday I made beet-basil pesto with red and green beet tops, basil, olive oil, garlic, and walnuts -- it turned out a strange, slightly unappetizing mauve color, but with an excellent tangy, spicy flavor.

Over the years since I've been shopping at farmers markets and growing my own food, I've developed a great love of beets--both roots and tops. And a deep devotion to borscht. Even if it didn't have such a unique and fabulous taste, the color alone is so beautiful that it makes a borscht-centered meal feel like a special occasion to me. How often do you get to put something magenta into your mouth, really?

My borscht does not include any cabbage, celery, or carrots, which from what I have gathered from borscht recipe perusing over the years, are traditional ingredients. I don't like to have too many ingredients distracting from the beets. Finely-chopped beet greens to add to the nutritional wallop of the soup, and are also a nice addition because if you grew the beets or bought them at a farmers market, you probably have tops to make use of somehow.

I have heard that the truly traditional way to make borscht is to ferment the beets first, and I want to try it one day, but this time I opted for a quicker time from dirt-to-mouth.

Beet roots contain folate, carotenoids, and flavoniods, and can help fight cancer and heart disease. Beet greens are chock full of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, all sorts of minerals (including magnesium and iron), and protein. A soup with both roots and greens feels like a good balance, nutritionally, energetically, and taste-wise to me.

I like my borscht creamy and tangy with a hint of sweetness to accentuate the natural sweet-tangy taste of the beets. I also like to roast the beets to bring out the sweetness even more, a trick I learned from my friend Shane.

So here's the recipe:

Anarcho-Southern Garden-Fresh Borscht

An extremely non-traditional spin on the classic Russian soup

Ingredients:

• 5 tablespoons butter
• 2 medium onions, quartered
• 2-3 medium potatoes, thinly sliced (I used Garnet Chili potatoes,an 1853 heirloom variety that we grew this year)
• A big pile of beet roots -- I used 9 cups whole beets, including Bull's Blood,Chiogga, and Yellow Intermediate Mangel varieties
• A handful of fresh dill weed, finely chopped
• A bunch of fresh beet tops/greens, including stems, finely chopped (about a cup chopped)
• 1 quart of plain, whole milk yogurt
• 1 teaspoon plus one pinch salt
• Black pepper
• 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
• 1 tablespoon honey
• Green onions for garnish

Making the pink purée

Instructions:

1. Roast the beets and onions in a cast iron dutch oven or ceramic baking dish with 2 Tbs. of the butter at 300 degrees until tender. I do this the night before and refrigerate the roasted beets and onions until I'm ready to use them the next day.
2. Puree the roasted beets in a blender, adding the yogurt as you go. If you need to add a bit of water to keep the blade turning, do so. You should end up with a smooth, beautiful, purpley-pink puree.
3. In that same cast iron dutch oven that you used for the roasting, saute the potatoes in the other 3 Tbs. of butter. Add a little water when they start to stick to the pot, cover and cook until soft. When the potatoes are almost done, add the beet greens and saute for another 5 minutes or so.
4. Add the pureed beetroot-onion-yogurt mixture to the potatoes and beet greens.
5. Add dill, the tsp. of salt, black pepper to taste, honey, and vinegar, plus water to thin a bit if desired. Cook over low heat for 20 minutes or so until the flavors are well melded.
6. Top with sour cream and finely-sliced green onions, and serve hot with crusty bread for dipping. Enjoy!

Borscht keeps for at least several days in the fridge (maybe longer -- it never lasts any longer than a day or two around here) and is excellent as a chilled summer soup.

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The finished soup ready to serve. . .just add sour cream and other optional toppings such as sliced green onions or a chopped hard boiled egg.

Five Things to do with Beet Thinnings

Young beet leaves, various lettuce varieties, and baby chard

The fall beets that we planted are growing every day, and the time for thinning has arrived.

If you want your beets to make big, juicy roots, thinning is critical. This is because beet seeds, which look like little asteroids, are actually seed clusters of several seeds fused together. If all or most of the seeds in the cluster germinate, you'll end up with a little clump of beet plants growing closely together everywhere that you planted one seed. This is all well and good for the beet plants--the plants will survive just fine growing in little clumps, but it is not so good for those of us who want to eat beet roots. The roots of all of the plants in the cluster would compete for nutrients and space without thinning.

Some say you can break up the beet seed clusters by rolling them with a rolling pin before planting, but I prefer to just plant them and thin.

Even though I have grown vegetables for many years, I still experience a twinge of sadness pulling a tiny, plucky, baby vegetable seedling up by the roots and tossing it in the compost pile. So whenever possible, I try to come up with ways to use the thinnings.

Here are my suggestions for ways to use your beet thinnings so that you can avoid that twinge --and because it really is a shame to waste even a few sweet, young, nutritious greens!

1. Mix them in with salads. Young beet greens, or "beet reds" as a friend of mine calls them, add beautiful color to spring and fall salads (see photo above).

2. Add them to pestos. Raw beet greens add gorgeous color and nutrition to pestos made with basil or other greens. Just throw them in the food processor with the other greens of your choice, lemon juice, olive oil, and nuts or seeds. For more on making pesto out of leaves other than basil, see my previous post on pesto.

3. Throw them in the skillet with your cooked greens. Add beet thinnings to kale, collards, or chard and steam or saute with a little vinegar, lemon juice, or tamari.

4. Ferment them. Add young beet leaves to the mix when you make sauerkraut or kimchee.

5. Juice them. Beet tops of any age can be juiced with other veggies. My favorite juice combination is beets, beet greens, carrots, ginger, and apples.

*Extra Credit*
For hardcore beetgreen lovers only:
My favorite recent discovery in the world of beet-thinnings is eating them just straight up, raw, dipped in plain yogurt. This way you really get to taste the flavor, and the creamy tartness of the yogurt is a fabulous foil for the strong, slightly bitter, buttery-crisp beet leaves.

Let me know if you have other uses for young beet greens...we have a lot of thinnings to find uses for these days!

Fall Beets

We just came in from planting a new bed in beets--3 heirloom varieties for late fall/early winter harvest.

We planted Chioggia (top photo), Bulls Blood (middle), and Detroit Dark Red (lower) beets in a raised bed amended with composted cow manure. We're hoping to harvest them before the ground freezes.

There's a lot of good info out there about fall gardening.

The image above of Chioggias is from a good article about Fall gardening in The Paper of Record, published a few years ago.

Here's some specific info on beets from Yardener:

"Beets will remain tasty and harvestable right up until the soil freezes hard which is usually 6 to 10 weeks after that first frost. Calculate when you think you will have the ground freezing hard, and back off 60 or 65 days for the date of the last fall succession planting of beets. Then move back another 3 weeks, and again another 3 weeks for the first planting of fall beets."

Beet greens are one of my staple foods. I also love raw grated beet roots as a topping for rice dishes and salads, and fermented beets are pretty fabulous too. Beets are an antioxidant-packed superfood; more here.

I cannot end this post any other way: the beet goes on.

Vegetable husbandry, succession gardening, and prayers for rain

The late corn that Bud and LJ and I planted is coming along, though getting a bit choked by it's overzealous bean sisters. It's raining a little today (HALLELUJAH!!!) and I'm hoping the rain will give the corn the boost it needs to outgrow the beans a little.

Since it's such a small patch of corn, we'll have to hand-pollinate at some point soon. I'm excited for our first adventure in vegetable husbandry/wifery, which is far less daunting than the livestock equivalent.

Meanwhile, we harvested a bunch of carrots and beets over the weekend (see below), some of which we enjoyed shredded last night in a delightful salad with white beans, wild rice, sunflower seeds, parsley, celery, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (plus salt and pepper for those of you who want to try this at home).



The rest of the beet and carrot harvest is either fermenting in one of the various crocks crowding our kitchen counters, or in cold storage (aka the fridge) to last, we hope, until the next round of roots are ready.

We're direct seeding carrots, beets, radishes, and mustards now for the fall--the photo below is C. mulching a carrot/radish bed we sowed on Saturday with heirloom French Breakfast Radish and Scarlet Nantes Carrot seeds.



The idea is that we'll keep sowing beets, carrots, and radishes every few weeks until the weather gets too cold--succession planting so that in theory we should have root crops to eat and share for a good while to come.

In the meantime, I am holding out hope for an long, steady downpour today (it's just a drizzle at this point) for our garden and all of the plants and animals, including we human animals, that are so desperate for rain after so many months of drought.

Let's have some RAIN!!!

Pesto, pesto, rah rah rah

On the lookout for ways to preserve food as the tidal wave of vegetables continues, I was inspired this morning by Jeff Ashton's musings on pesto in his book The 12- Month Gardener.

Jeff lives somewhere around here and I've taken his classes at the Organic Growers School. I credit him with a lot of what I know about raised beds and season extension. Christopher recently invested in a used copy of the The 12- Month Gardener to help with planning our fall garden, and as I was skimming around in it I noticed an interesting sidebar about making pesto out of unconventional vegetables. At the mention of beet greens, my eyes lit up.

We grew "Bulls Blood" beets this year, a heirloom variety with a deep, dark red leafy top. I love to eat the luscious red leaves, which seem just packed with pure vegetable nutrition and taste strong and hearty. But lately I can't eat them fast enough to keep up with the garden. I'm fermenting the beet roots, but I'd been wondering how to put away the greens without cooking the good nutritional juju out of them. Aha! Beet green pesto preserves the greens raw, with all of the nutritional value intact, and the fact that the leaves are all holey and not aesthetically pleasing after a season of insect snacking doesn't matter after they are food-processed into pestodom.

My previous pesto-making endeavors have been limited to variations on the traditional basil standard. But after the Jeff Ashton tip and on the heels of savoring the purslane pesto that Alan made last week I leapt with gusto into the world of unconventional pestos.

I made 4 different batches one morning last week -- 3 with various combinations of sorrel, beet greens, and Magenta Spreen lambsquarters (above is one gorgeous volunteer plant in the garden, re-seeded from last year) and 1 with a bunch of "sundried" tomatoes from our dehydrating adventures and basil from the garden.

My tasters tell me that the sundried tomato/basil one is the best, but I am partial to a pink pesto that's heavy on the dark red beet greens and bright pink lambsquarters.

Here's an approximate recipe:

• Beet leaves/tops
• Lambsquarters (wild green or cultivated Magenta Spreen)
• French sorrel
• Flat leaf parsley
• Sunflower seeds
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Peeled garlic cloves
• Lemon juice
• A little water if necessary to make the food processor swirl

These can be combined in an almost infinite variety of proportions. I used somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 cup of sunflower seeds, 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/4 cup lemon juice for every batch, along with 5 or 6 cloves of garlic and greens to fill up the rest of the food processor. You can skip the lemon juice if you add a lot of sorrel, since it's super lemony.

Which reminds me to sing the praises of sorrel. It's perennial. It's easy. It's très gourmet. It's beautiful in the garden from the time it first appears in the spring to its tall, flowering peak. And it tastes so good! I can't say enough good things about it, really. Sorrel, how do I love you? Let me count the ways. I like it in salads, as a cooked green, in soups, and today I learned it's fabulous in pesto too.

Here's some in our garden (above).

In any case, viva el pesto!