Beet salad

  I love buying beets from the farmer's market.  Each year, they come into the market and they are the one vegetable that you can count on all the way till fall.
  I've made several different versions of this salad, but the simplest is still my very favorite.


Ingredients:
Beets
Feta
Toasted walnuts or pecans or pistachios/chopped
Orange muscat champange vinegar (Trader Joes brand)
Olive Oil

First clean and trim the beets. Remove greens (good for sauteing later) and root. Wrap beets in aluminum foil after rubbing beet with olive oil. Wrap beet and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour, or till forks inserts easily.

After beets cools a bit, rub skin off under running water till smooth.  Chop beets into cubes and refrigerate till cool.  In bowl put beet cubes/crumbled feta and roasted chopped nuts.  Splash with vinegar just enough to add a little flavor but not to make contents soggy.  It's a great lunchbox salad and lasts in fridge for a few days. Easy is an understatement here.

I've tried two versions, one with the vinegar, dijon mustard and olive oil mixed together but I still find the best is just plain old vinegar.

Summer Salad Rolls

  As the weather has been so nice it makes me think what can I make for dinner to be light and not something needing to be eaten hot.  Well, summer rolls, salad rolls, spring rolls...whatever you wish to call them, they're good, especially on a hot day.  Have with a side of fruit, we had watermelon, and you've got a great little meal. On a winter's day, I would of paired with Tom Yum soup.
   You do need a few ingredients here, which you should prepare before the actual assembly begins because the spring roll wrappers are a bit tricky to work with and timing is everything.

Ingredients: 
Spring Roll wrappers                  
cellaphane noodles
mung bean sprouts
English cucumbers/sliced into thin strips
carrots/shave into thin slices
prawns/cooked and sliced long wise down the middle
basil/chiffonade
cilantro leaves
chili sauce
peanut sauce

  Prepare all the vegetables prior to assembling the spring rolls. You'll also need to have everything in order for the process as it's definetly important to have things in line of how you will put them into the spring roll, make sure to throw a carrot to the dog too as he'll be waiting at your heals for whatever you may drop.  It'll give you some space.
   You'll need to have a plate or shallow dish with warm water and another plate with damp paper towels for assembling the spring rolls and keeping them moist while you work.

  Put a dried wrapper into the warm water, making sure all edges are submerged, soak till pliable but not soggy then move to plate with dampened paper towels and add another shell to water. 
  Add the shrimp to the bottom of the shell, as that's what will show through and be pretty, along side add the cilantro leaves.  On top of the shrimp you will put the drained cellophane noodles, sprouts, basil, carrots, and cucumber slices. 

From there you will begin to roll, pull one side up first, tucking all contents into the wrapper, then pull both the ends into the wrapper and roll to the other end.

  As you prepare each wrapper you will layer them between waxed paper or saran wrap so that they don't stick to each other and tear. 

We always have ours the typical way, loads of peanut sauce and chili garlic sauce. Spicy is always better.

I haven't made these in a while, but I've done with a couple different variations before, I've used shredded broccoli, I've used cabbage slaw, I've read to use slivered mango too.  What ever way you want to make them, I hope you enjoy.

A day of shopping for the flower beds.

  I know we all have our favorite flowers we plant each year and a specific order in which we do these things but I don't know about you, but I've been really off with this gray yucky weather we've had so much of.

  I have tried to motivate myself to go pull weeds, to get the flower beds cleaned out again, yes, I did clean them all out when we had that fluke week of warm weather in February that had us all thinking early spring. Unfortunately they all grew back during the last 4 months of gray skies and rain. 

  So last week I did find some motivation on my days off to get the flower pots all dumped out that were to far gone, to the others I just added new soil and some fresh herbs and petunias in the others.  That was the beginning of my motivating to bring color back into the yard, although you can see, the slugs found theirs too, they raced right up to slime my precious posies.  Did I mention I really hate slugs?

  So off to my local Mclendon's I went this week, the best deal in town and it's locally owned, so I'm all about supporting them by shopping there. The stop there  just began  my need for more flowers and to surround myself in color, so down to Carpineto Bros next to find a few plants I wasn't finding.  They had some geraniums, which seemed to be scarce this time of year already and they had alot more of the yellows that weren't just marigolds which I was trying to find.

I bought a bunch of yellow petunias, these portulacas and some bright cheery snap dragons. Of Course those couldn't be left  without  the pinks and purples that also were calling out to me and strangely enough the reds.  I usually stick to traditional English garden colors, but figured since I was adding yellow, why not? But I do have to  wonder if it will help the darned dandelions blend in more? I also managed a bit more of orange too, or  more coral I guess.

Who can resist the charms of these happy blooms?  I find myself just wanting to cover the yard in all these bright happy colors, to keep the gloomy gray skies away.

After I left Carpineto Bros I decided that I should go check out another of the local nursery's that is also a produce stand over in Maple Valley.  They had more geraniums, so after buying a couple pinks and hot pinks, they didn't really have much else for geraniums, I decided I should be done spending and hope for some of my seeds in my cutting garden to help me out for indoor cut flowers. Now the real work begins....getting rid of the grass that seems to take over my flower beds each year.  I seem to do this process each year in reverse order, buy first, weed second.  Hmm, will I ever get that one through my head?  Or perhaps if I have the flowers, it forces me to get the weeds out.

T

Petunias and pansies always remind me of my grandmother Clara, who lived in Minnesota. She always had so many of them surrounding different areas in the yard, she'd bend down on arthritic knees and put them in each year in every color combination possible.  No solid colored ones for her, always the stripped, the frilly, and the multicolored.  I remember her sending me out after supper to pick all the spent blooms off to keep them going. 
  All in all, flowers bring cheer to all, after all, isn't that why we take them to our loved ones when they're ill?   Hope you all get some time to plant a little "cheer" in your yards too.