Oh my goodness! I feel like I am about to fall over, I am so
exhausted from all the domesticity I put myself through today. This morning I woke up around 7:30am, fed the
cat, brought in the paper, and watered the lawn. Then I clipped coupons while watching “Meet
the Press” (one of my favorite Sunday activities). By 9:30 am, I was out in the front yard
pruning/weeding. I wanted to try to get
out there before it got too hot . . . which only lasted until about 11:30am, at
which point, I was sweating through the baseball cap I was wearing (gross I
know). I will say this: I never want to
let the plants on our side yard get that overgrown again! My arms and legs have small cuts all over from
the red grass bushes that attacked me as they apparently decided they didn’t
want to be trimmed.
After the sweltering yard work, I
decided to seek some respite inside, and found that Aaron had woken up and was lounging
on the couch, eating a bowl of cereal while watching a Star Trek movie. I sat down to watch the end of it with him
then we started watching “Mad Men” – I am completely enjoying that show! I am absolutely in love with the wardrobe of
Mrs. Don Draper. I would want to wear
every single one of her dresses. It’s
also really interesting to watch the role of women in the Mad Men era and see
how far we’ve come. I find it amusing
that the housewives were taking pity on the one divorced woman on their street –
her house was a mess, and she ate frozen food because she had to work and didn’t
have time to cook or clean . . . yeah, when they showed her house, it looked a
lot like mine, and I buy frozen meals for weekday lunches . . . because I don’t
have time to cook or clean a lot of the time either. Except on Sunday, which brings me to the food
I made today.
This week, my CSA box from Farm Fresh to You came with beets (and a bunch of other locally grown organic yummyness as
well).
I will keep experimenting with
beets until I find a recipe I truly love.
After asking around for beet recipes, I finally decided that I would do Sautéed Beets with Beer (aka Guinness Beets).
I mainly decided on that recipe because the only ingredient I had to
purchase was Guinness and it looked pretty easy. Turns out it tasted pretty good too!
First I cut the greens off the
beets and then boiled the beets. While
the beets were boiling, I sorted through the greens and picked out the ones
that looked edible (many of them had wilted or looked like maybe a bug had
dinner before the beets were picked at the farm). The CSA box also came with chard, so I cut up
the chard and added it to the beet greens.
The way the recipe is written, it seems like it wants you to boil the stout
and make the sauce while the beets are boiling.
However, I would recommend waiting until after the beets are done
boiling. The reason is that the beer
sauce reduces very quickly, and the beets take a while to finish boiling. And then, once the beets are done boiling,
they still need time to cool down so that you can rub the skins off. To make up for this minor error, I ended up
turning the sauce down to a simmer and supplementing more Guinness as it
reduced.
Once the beets were done boiling
and their skins were rubbed off, I put them in the pan with the sauce and let
them simmer while I wilted the greens. I
used half the amount of butter the recipe calls for – both in the sauce and on
the greens. I think next time I will use
even less butter on the greens . . . I prefer my veggies with as little grease
as possible. I also Foreman grilled some
chicken breast and added spices to some leftover rice.
Et voila:
It turned out pretty darn
tasty. Even Aaron liked it, and he is
definitely not a big beet fan. In fact,
he wasn’t quite sure what they were at first.
Since neither Aaron nor I are big Guinness fans, I also bought some
cider and we made snake bites to go with our dinner (half Guinness, half
cider). We sat at the table and ate and
talked . . . like grownups. :)
We had some rice and beets
leftover, but the greens and chicken were gobbled up. I didn’t include the cost of the snake bite
drinks, which would add another $1.66 per person.
Here’s the tally for what the
meal cost:
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