Drink your beets: Beetroot Frappé

The Beetroot Frappé is one of my favourite drinks at Fresh, and their cookbook includes a recipe. Ginger, beets, apples and carrots, blended up with nutmeg and ice. I skipped the blending part and just whisked in the nutmeg.

Beets and carrots from Grow for The Stop via Fiesta Farms. Apples from Plan B.

Also: pumpkin chia pudding is excellent folded into plain Greek yogurt and topped with maple syrup and pecans.

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I’m only a level-two juicer

I’m out of oranges and the bf is allergic to fresh apples, so I made a veg-only juice this evening. Wow, it is intense. Beet-carrot-celery-ginger, and I should have made it more carrot-heavy than I did.

I’m not new to vegetable juice, but I’ve always had it blended with fruit to sweeten and lighten the taste. This – this is hard to get down, to be honest. Which makes me feel like a wimp. But if I go back to my university years and frequent visits to Victoria’s Rebar (which, come to think of it, I’m still paying for…), I never even liked the vegetable blends – I would always choose pure fruit juices.

So am I getting tougher? How long does it take to get used to a heavy beet juice?

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Curried Carrot Salad

Just made a batch of this carrot salad from Epicurious (originally from the May Bon Appétit) for my lunches this week. Tastes decent, although I think the flavours need to meld before I can really tell. Here are the changes I made (mainly due to missing ingredients):

• Used a shallot instead of green onion
• Almost doubled the yogurt and lemon juice
• Full-fat yogurt from Pinehenge Farms, of course – who can eat that fat-free stuff?
• Added a splash of agave syrup (would have used maple or just sugar but I’m out of both) to counteract a slight bitter flavour
• Left out the mint

All ready for lunch tomorrow (and I really need to stop taking photos in my kitchen after dark):

Also:

(Yes, that’s a local squirrel.)

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Grated beet and carrot salad

Plan B is back to sending me tons of carrots, and I improvised this salad to help use them up. (Excuse the terrible picture, I made this when it was already dark out.)

Mix together (all to taste):

• Grated carrots and beets
• Sunflower seeds
• Olive oil and lemon juice
• Salt and pepper
• Crushed garlic
• Chopped fresh parsley
• Chopped beet greens (optional – if your beets came with them)

This makes a delicious side dish, or you can make it a full meal – serve with a hard-boiled egg and some black bread and pickles to make it really Russian-style. You can embellish it in a number of ways, too – tonight for my dinner I tossed some with mixed greens, a chopped apple and a spoonful of sour cream.

Also, I picked the rest of my beans from the garden today. Aren’t they pretty?

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Use up extra carrots with carrot cupcakes

In all my efforts to use up the cabbages I get with my organics box, I’ve been neglecting the carrots, and I suddenly realized the other day that I had a big backlog. At the same time I was craving cake, so carrot cake seemed in order. I have an amazing recipe from the Rebar Cookbook for a layered carrot cake but I don’t really need to eat an entire cake by myself, and it’s not all that convenient to take on the subway so I can pawn them off on my coworkers. So instead, I found a recipe for carrot cupcakes with white chocolate cream cheese icing (yes, they’re as good as they sound) and baked up a batch. 12 cupcakes used up 2 cups of grated carrot (about three carrots) so I’ll be making another batch soon, I think.

The recipe is quite good but as per usual I made a bunch of modifications. Here’s what I did:

• Cut back quite a bit on the sugar – 2/3 or 3/4 cup of white instead of 1 1/8; 1/4 cup of brown instead of 1/3 – and I used raw sugar instead of brown as I’m out of brown. If you don’t ice them you may want to use more sugar than I did, but with the icing they’re plenty sweet.
• Doubled or even tripled the spices – I like lots of ginger and cinnamon and they’re good for you, too. I might add some grated fresh ginger next time I make these.
• Used pecans instead of walnuts (allergies) – one commenter said she used coconut instead of walnuts and that would be good, too.
• I halved the icing recipe (saved the other half of the cream cheese block in the freezer for next time) and still had too much icing. If you can do the math, a 1/3 recipe would probably work.
• Cut back on the sugar in the icing – 1 2/3 cup instead of 2 cups.
• Used the zest of one orange instead of orange essence, which I don’t have and didn’t want to buy. A mixture of lemon and orange would be good, too.

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