Recipe of the Week: Beets ‘n’ Sweets

For Mother’s Day weekend I decided to try a recipe that I had been eyeing for the past month. I found Roasted Beets ‘n’ Sweets on allrecipes.com (Have I mentioned how much I loooove that site? Because I do! I want to marry it!) and couldn’t wait to try it, as there were no ingredients that I don’t already harbor an unholy love for (my grammar sucks today, meh).

I love beets, but so far I’ve only had them one way: boiled plain, no extra spices of any kind. Sweet potatoes were something that I disliked for about 95% of my life but have grown to appreciate more recently, as in merely six months ago when my mom made caramelized sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving. Garlic and onions are of course old favorites; I put either of them in pretty much anything.

For my incarnation of this recipe (I don’t have any good pics, unfortunately, but there are pics on allrecipes), I replaced the garlic powder with half a head of minced fresh garlic and replaced the white sugar with brown sugar.

The end result was yummy, although some of the chunks of beets weren’t quite tender enough and I thought it could use a bit more onion and a tiny bit more salt. But it was definitely a nice meal to have on a cool, rainy day and I’ll certainly be making it again.

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Recipe of the Week: Roasted Garlic

Even though we knew we’d be spending the past weekend out of town, I was adamant about trying a new recipe for the week. We were staying with my sister-in-law after all, and I knew that she had a kitchen (a particularly roomy one at that, compared to our tiny space), so the show must go on!

Well…yeah. My SIL has a kitchen all right, and it’s got a fridge, stove/oven, toaster oven, and a microwave. She even had flatware and silverware. But that was about it. No roasting pans, cookie sheets, rolling pin, cutting board, ANYTHING. In other words, her kitchen was severely anemic, and while I’m sure I could have figured SOMETHING out that didn’t require us to buy new kitchen ware that would make what we had at home redundant, I didn’t want to get started on anything and have to pause mid-recipe because it called for something that I took for granted that she had.

So we decided to wait until we got back home, when we had little time and no energy to do it after all the driving and unpacking, and so I decided on something ridiculously simple just for the sake of saying that I had done anything at all.

And so, yeah. Roasted garlic. I cut the top off of a head of garlic, poured a little bit of olive oil on top, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, wrapped it in foil, and then stuck the packet in a 350 degree oven for 50 minutes.

The finished product was soft and tasted like, well, garlic. The book (Betty Crocker cookbook) had said that garlic develops a sweet flavor when roasted, but I didn’t notice anything like that. It just tasted like garlic. By itself it was unimpressive and kind of gross (I mean, it’s garlic! Not chocolate! Who just eats a clove of garlic? I’d much prefer a clove of chocolate!), but I bet it would be really yummy smooshed into something else, like butter for garlic butter (I don’t know if that’s how you make garlic butter, that’s just what came to mind).

I’ve got to think of something not quite so “meh” for this coming weekend’s recipe, preferably something that could be gifted to my mom. I’m open to suggestions!