Rancho Rewind: Beet Pizza

One of the things that I'm most looking forward to in the winter garden are all of the beets.  Last year Jeremy and I made beet pizza a couple of times, and flipping through photos, I came across one of our creations that got me excited for this years crop.

We used the regular pizza dough from Trader Joe's for this one.  (We need to start making our own, I know it's easy, but not as easy as buying it from TJs!)  We usually brush a little olive oil onto the sheet pan and then sprinkle that with some yellow corn meal. (Nope, we don't gots a pizza stone.)  After a couple of initial versions, we decided that with a beet pizza we need to pre-bake the crust before adding the toppings (the beets and beet greens have so much moisture that it makes it hard for the crust to crisp up if you don't). So we bake the plain crust for 8 minutes or so, pull it out and dress it up.

 Dressing it up:

• sauteed beet greens
• I just chop them up and through them into a hot cast iron pan with a little olive oil, salt and crushed red pepper.  Cook until wilted and just tender.
• roasted beets
• I scrub them, cut the tops off, and put them into a roasting pan or pyrex.
• larger beets I might cut in half, but otherwise I leave them whole.
• sprinkle a couple of teaspoons of water into the pan, cover tight with aluminum foil, and roast at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes, until fork tender.
• let the beets cool, then peel the skins off with your fingers.  (it's a little messy, but the skins come off really easily.)
• cut the cooled beets into thick slices.
• walnuts , rough chopped
  
• goat cheese
• parmesean cheese
• fresh parsley, chopped
  

Spread the goat cheese on the pre-baked crust.  Distribute the greens and the sliced beets over the cheese.  Sprinkle walnuts and parmesean over the top.  Bake for another 8-10 minutes. Sprinkle parsley on the finished pie.

We kept it pretty basic, but you could easily add other flavors that would be great.  Maybe some balsamic vinegar or flavored olive oil or walnut oil drizzled over the top when it comes out of the oven?  Chives, onions or shallots?  Pickled onions or shallots?  Pine nuts?  Blue cheese?  No cheese?  However it is modified, I am looking forward to recreating it with at least a part of the new season's crop.  Hurry up beets!

Winter Vegetable Garden

Three weeks ago now, I got the lower bed seeded with the winter veg.  This is the first season that we haven't planted both beds at the same time; we are officially "experimenting"  - in the effort to learn to stagger our crops, to know more about which perennials we can leave in the ground from season to season, and to figure out just what we can do in the space we have. So the eggplants and peppers stayed put in the upper bed and I planted bits and pieces around them.  The lower bed got the full-on, seed sowing treatment.  Mainly, I used standard row planting - short rows that cut vertically along the long bed.  I did break a little from the seed-packet recommendations though, and set my rows closer together - about 12 inches apart, as opposed to 24 to 32 inches.  I could just be shooting my cabbages in the foot (or is it shooting my cabbages in the head?) trying to squeeze more out of the space.  We'll see.

Here's what I sowed:

• Upper Bed
• 1 row Butter lettuce  (Renee's Garden)
• 1 small patch Common arugula  (Seed Savers)
• Along the length of the lower bed
• 4 Copenhagen Market cabbages  (Seed Savers)
• 4 Mammoth Red Rock cabbages  (Seed Savers)
• 4 Early Snowball cauliflower  (Seed Savers)
• Starting from the north end of the lower bed
• 1 row heirloom shelling peas  (Renee's Garden)
• 1 row Tonda di Parigi carrots  (Renee's Garden) & French Breakfast radishes  (Seed Savers)
• 1 row De Cicco broccoli  (Seed Savers)
• 1 row Cosmic Purple carrots  (Renee's Garden) & Watermelon radishes  (Renee's Garden)
• 1 row Chef's Choice cauliflower, mixed colors  (Renee's Garden)
• 1 row Purplette mini onions  (Huntington)
  
• 1 row Purple Top White Globe turnips  (Seed Savers)
• 1 row Romanesco broccoli  (Seed Savers)
• 1 row Cipollini onions  (Huntington)
• 1 row Cylindria beets & Burpee's Golden beets  (both Seed Savers)
• 1 row Five Color silverbeet  (Seed Savers)
• 1 row Bull's Blood beets & Chioggia beets  (both Seed Savers)
• 1 row Sunshine carrots  (Renee's Garden)
• 1 row Pigeon peas  (from Irma)
• Herb Garden
• Italian Large Leaf Basil  (Armstrong's seedling)
• Coriander  (Armstrong's seedling)
• Curled Chervil  (Armstrong's seedling)
• Italian Parsley  (Armstrong's seedling)
• Florence fennel  (Renee's Garden)
  
• Nasturtium  (Burpee's)
  

Bulbs: Part One

Along with the edibles, it has always been a part of the plan to have a cutting garden at Rancho Garbonzo as well.  Natives they are not, but a vase of dahlias or tulips or peonies on the mantle is hard to beat.  So, last weekend I got started by planting 100 daffodil bulbs on the slope under our pepper tree.  (Daffodils remind me of my Grams.)

The area is really shady, with only a little dappled light here and there throughout the day.  Unlike the rest of our yard, this slope has been covered with a thick layer of mulch for the last few years - partly just leaves and twigs that have fallen from the huge tree above, and partly a deliberately placed load of chipped yard waste that the tree trimmer dropped off a couple of years back. Also unlike the rest of the yard, the soil that I uncovered beneath the mulchy top layer was lovely! Not a clumpy ball of reddish clay in sight! Now is that just the mulch working its magic over time on our crummy soil or was there completely different soil in this section of our yard to begin with?  I think the former makes the most sense.  Three cheers for the mulch!  So, bone meal and bulbs into the ground and fingers crossed; I'm hoping that we'll see some of these babies popping up by the start of Spring.

 

(Unfortunately not my yard, the pics are scanned from the bulb bags.  I bought them at Costco.)

Berry Patch

Last weekend we planted our berry patch.  We dug out the crusty lump of earth, just below the herb garden, removing the fine clay soil about a foot deep.

 Into the hole went a mass of alfalfa that will eventually rot and give the spot a boost of organic matter (we hope).

The alfalfa was topped with many bags of new, loamy, composty garden soil.  And nine new strawberry plants were planted.  Woot woot!  We planted Alpine Strawberries or Fragaria vesca - they are much smaller than the garden strawberries we are used to but are supposed to be super sweet, flavory, and delicious.  Here's hoping that we get enough of a crop to make some jam!

Marty watched.

Woodenware Care

In a fit of inspiration I decided to breakout a gifted and never used "woodenware care and repair kit" we had amongst our cleaning supplies.  I had been wanting or needing to condition some cool 1960s stainless serving utensils with hardwood handles and decided to give it a try.  I ended up oiling almost every wooden kitchen utensil in our possession.  I am now a convert - I never realized what a difference it could make.

The product I used is Tree Spirit  (although any pure mineral oil will do) and is designed for use on wood items that come in contact with food.  You just apply the oil using a rag and then lightly sand with 600 grit sandpaper.  Reapply as needed and wipe clean after 30 min.  This removes the raised/ rough wood to a smooth finish.  Our wooden spoons look and feel amazing.  Our knife block never looked so good and our cutting boards are protected from the ravages of cutting and washing.  If you got some time I highly recommend it.

crawly creepy

Last weekend, when I was sorting out the lower vegetable bed, I came across a large, spotted brown spider in the tomatoes.  Feeling a bit more courageous than I might have without my thick garden gloves on, I decided to cut the branch she was on and move her to a new home among the eggplants.

 After moving her to the bed above, I noticed a couple things:

1) three white, spikey egg sacks that had been hidden behind the leaves I'd cut away on the tomato plant.

2) when the spider crawled to the top of the eggplant leaf, I spied a neon orange hour glass on the underside of her belly.

It was pretty easy to identify.  I typed "brown widow" into Google and found a bunch of  info.  If I'd had any doubt, the egg sacks sealed the deal of our spider being a Latrodectus geometricus - commonly known as the brown widow, a close cousin to the black widow.  After reading last weeks post on Ramshackle Solid about black widows, I felt a certain camaraderie in knowing that it wasn't just us - other people are sharing their yards and homes with these scary creatures too. But now we have kin whose poison is supposedly twice as toxic? 

I'm beginning to rethink our "catch and release" policy.

Changing Over

Over the past weekend we said goodbye to the tomatoes.  It was less of an emotional farewell than it was last fall - the tomatoes just weren't the same.  They were delicious, just not prolific.  We had a few rounds of bruschetta.  We have three measly jars of frozen sauce. Salsa a couple of times.  You know, just not the bounty that we had last year.  The tomatoes shared the bed this summer with four different varieties of cucumber and several types of bean that also never really sprung into action. Oh well, bring on the cool weather and the winter garden.  Brassicas here we come!

After removing all the plants, except for the spindly family of asparagus that live at one end of the bed, we added some home made amendments to the soil.  Very exciting.  This is really the first time we added a load of our own composts - worm and regular.  Though I think we could have used twice as much of both, we were kind of proud to see the efforts of tightening our waste management system go right into the garden in the form of dark, rich organic matter.  Pretty cool.  We also added some drip irrigation.

We are hoping that the new drip will do for our vegetables what it has done for the herb bed - super happy plants.  We covered the bed with a new coat of alfalfa and are looking forward to planting seed next weekend.  The upper bed, on the other hand, got only a small editing. The peppers, eggplants,  and zucchini are still growing strong.  So, fingers crossed, we will have a smooth transition into the new season - some remaining summer/fall veg to use as the winter/spring things get on with it.