I love veggies! Most recently, I love beets. The dreaded purple root hated by most and revered by few. I grew (a joke!) to love beets because of Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef from England. Jamie has been going through a similar transformation in his life as I have in the past year or two. He moved out of the city and into the bucolic village where he grew up and he started planting veg seeds. Last year Vikki and I planted our first garden and enjoyed some successes (basil, tomato, rosemary, and thyme) and some failures (zucchini and squash... destroyed by vine borers). We were majorly ambitious this year tripling the types of veggies we planted and we started most all of them from seeds. While many things are doing very well, my poor little, beloved, beets have not performed well at all. I planted one batch only for them to die after transplanting. I then tried to start them from seed in the ground... no dice. I then planted some more in deeper flats to start off with and out of ten seeds/fruits I now have two lonely little beet plants. Booooooo. I'm hoping that starting them in the fall will be better (I don't think they like the heat).
Even though beets have been a failure in the garden Vikki and I have been roasting them and enjoying the crap out of some store bought purple beauties. Beets are a lot like carrots in that they become sweet when roasted. Since these guys are so similar we decided (with the suggestion from Jamie Oliver's book, "Jamie at home"... which also had a food network series dedicated to the book featuring Jamie cooking at his house and in his garden) to make a beet cake (pictured above). Vikki did all the work, so give her some praise! You basically take your favorite carrot cake recipe and substitute beets for carrots. I love it. It is a little different, but how cool do you feel when you say you ate a beet cake? Even Cash likes it! Now if I could only find a recipe for brussels sprout cake...
