B b-B b-b-b Beets!

My friend Candace and I share a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share. One of our local farms, the World Hunger Relief farm produces vegetables for eight months out of the year and we commit to buying the food for those eight months. This deal has a number of benefits. It supports locally purchased food cutting down on transportation costs, middle man sales etc. It also allows the farmer or farm to have a set sustainable income (rather than an unpredictable amount of sales) which encourages them to produce more since they know exactly what their income is. My favorite benefit of this deal is that every Tuesday, my friend Candace and I get fresh, organic, produce picked that morning. We share the share (along with our other friend John) because there is generally a lot of produce that we can’t eat it all in a week. The shares are designed to provide produce for a small family, so our “small family”, Candace and her husband Scott, our friend John, and my husband Greg and I all partake of delicious vegetables throughout the week. I’ll tell more about the WHR farm over time, but for now, suffice it to say, this has been one of my favorite ways to use our budgeted income. It’s like Christmas every Tuesday when I anticipate, “What did the farm send me home with today?” Well this week I was not at all disappointed.

Actually…to be more accurate., they sent me home with beets on May 11. I had no idea what to do with them. I’ve never had a beets in my life and the only thing I could think of in reference to them, was a friend telling me she never liked them because she always ate them pickled, and “The Beets” from Doug. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=doug+nickelodeon&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

So today, fourteen days after the farm gave me my present, I roasted my beets with a number of other farm veggies, carrots, summer squash, a few radishes as well as red onions and green onions. I must also say that I grew the green onions and my urban community church garden provided the red onions. I roasted all of them with a little balsamic vinegar, olive oil and salt and pepper. It just might go down on record as my favorite vegetable side dish ever and my next garden planting will most certainly contain a harvest of beets!.