Beet Ravioli

I've looked several times at beet ravioli pictures and recipes online, so when I found myself with a couple of beets and nothing in particular to do with them, I thought I'd try it out. I roughly followed Martha Stewart's Recipe and in hind sight I wish I had followed it more closely, because it turned out to be a complete failure.

Here's how it started: I had four beets, one of which was a Chioggia, which is shown below. (Btw I don't think I'll grow these next year...they aren't that fantastic looking and lose what color they have during cooking





I roasted all four beets, 350 F for a bit over an hour. I refrigerated them overnight, then the next day I peeled them and threw them into my mini food processor.


I then added two eggs to the food processor and blended it up.


This liquid went into a couple cups of flour (roughly half all purpose, half semolina)


I then rolled out the dough using my Kitchenaid and because the dough was so soft and kind of mushy, I decided to refrigerate that overnight. The consistancy of the dough should have been my first clue that I'd f***ed up, but instead I refrigerated the pasta sheets, which actually just made it crumbly and tough. Not helpful.

I mixed up a filling with herbed goat cheese, ricotta, and some shredded mozzerella and loaded it all up into my Kitchenaid ravioli maker. Here are most of the results:


Only a few raviolis ended up looking half decent.


However, because I hate to waste my own work and am somewhat clever, all was not lost. I froze the good looking raviolis for another night. With the demented raviolis and the leftover filling, I decided to put together a lasagna! I ran out to the garden and clipped some chard.


Then I layered that onto the ravioli mess.


Then the cheese filling.


And, somewhat to my horror, some Six Cheese Ragu. Don't get me wrong, I have a unreasonable LOVE for jars of store bought red sauce, but pouring it onto my homemade "ravioli", fresh cut chard, and a decadent goat cheese filling was decidedly sacreligious. BUT it was the only sauce I had on hand, so on it went.


I topped that with a bit more retarded ravioli and pasta scraps, another layer of sauce, and shredded mozzarella.





In the end, it actually was pretty delicious. The pasta texture was a little off, but was honestly quite tasty. I think I will probably even make the beet pasta again. Next time I think I'll follow the recipe a little closer, and will probably skip the ravioli making and go for another lasagna. It would be fun to make a lasagna with red pasta sheets and a white sauce, a reverse of the usual colors.

Stay tuned for a few days from now when I use the ravioli that weren't disasters.

Beet and Chard Flatbread Pizza

Yesterday I pulled two beautiful beets out of the ground. This got me looking for something interesting to do with them. So today I made a DELICIOUS beet and chard pizza.



Instead of a traditional pizza sauce like pesto or marinara I made a sauce by blending chard, some oil, and some garlic.

The dough recipe I got from this website. If I'm honest, I'm not sure I'll use it again. The dough was very elastic and it took forever to stretch it thin. I had to stretch it and let it rest and stretch it again about 4 times. I even was letting the dough rest stretched over an upside-bowl to try to get gravity to work in my favor.

I roasted the beets yesterday. An hour in foil in a 350 degree oven and they were seriously the tastiest beets I've ever had. It was all I could do to not eat them right then.

Chioggia Beet (sadly, they lost their pink/white stripes in the cooking)

Slices of beets, a few slices of mozzarella, and topped with a little thyme, and then into the oven. I already had a pan preheating (not as good as a pizza stone but oh well!), so I slid it onto the pan and baked it at 450 for 10 mins. The last minute I switched it to broil to brown the cheese a little.

Changes for next time: better quality cheese, different crust recipe, and cook it a little longer to brown the crust more.
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Corn

Planted corn seeds today in little homemade newspaper pots. Corn supposedly hates being transplanted and these pots should help since they can be planted with the transplant and breakdown readily.



I also put beet and radish seeds in the garden to fill in any gaping holes in the fava bean/strawberry/melon bed and sprinkled some carrot seeds around as well.

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More plants!

Finished double digging the north vegetable bed today! It was late in the day but I convinced myself I needed to get the peas in...and now I'm glad I did. There's a roughly 20 foot row of peas with 3" spacing, alternating one snap pea to every two snow peas. This is partly because there were more snow pea seeds in a packet and partly because the plants only grow half as tall so I figure I'll need more of them to get roughly equal yields. the peas should be up in no time. They were all sprouting roots and stems already (from being between wet paper towels for 5 days) and I didn't bury them very deep.

I also planted a dozen or more sunflower seeds and two rhubarb starts.

If I have time tomorrow I'm hoping to get tomatoes, scallions, garlic, and shallots in...or at least dig a bed for them and plant on Monday or Tuesday.

Almost all the Favas have sprouted and sweet peas are pushing through here and there. Three strawberry starts have green in them and the seeds I planted among the strawberries may be starting to germinate as well! They could just be weed seeds, but at least some of the look like beet or chard seedlings. Only time will tell.


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Plants in the Ground!

I spent several hours this afternoon finally putting plants in the ground instead of just digging the place up! Along the eastern wall of my garden there is now a row of ~27 fava beans (I forgot to count before some of them got buried) with 3-4 sweet pea seeds in between them.

Strawberry starts were placed in an intensive pattern with 12 inch spacing. On the south end of the bed there are 12 Ozark Beauty starts, on the north end are 12 Sequoia starts, and in between there are 12 Quinalt starts. Because these form a pretty diamond pattern due to their spacing I planted seeds between them. Inside each diamond there are now three beet seeds around two globe amaranth seeds with mesclun seeds sprinkled randomly throughout. In each front triangle along the wood partition there are lobelia seeds with poppy seeds at the top of each triangle. Towards the back, just in front of the fava/sweet pea row, there is a row of swiss chard planted between the strawberries sprinkled with dual colored caesar romaine and patches of three bachelor's button seeds just in front to fill out the triangle.

I expect to see favas and sweet peas pop up in only a few days since most of them were already sticking their little roots out and a few were working on their stems. It's so exciting to finally have something in the ground!