Potato Chip Pizza and Other Ridiculosities

Well, dear readers, at the end of my last post I promised a scrumptious new recipe with spelt flour and potatoes and all sorts of delights. Except, it turns out that when you put fifteen things together that taste good, it doesn't always make it 15 X better (or even 0.015 X better). The whole wheat flour and spelt flour combined to make a brick of a crust, despite some all-purpose flour added to "lighten it up." The rosemary was hidden, in appearance and taste, beneath the thin slices of Yukon Gold potatoes, and the eggs cracked on top turned into a mess resembling a rubber tire. I'm not sure I could have told the difference between the two.

I probably seem a little cracked myself, putting eggs on a pizza, but I promise other people do it. In fancy places. Only, they do it in a supah hot oven where the crust can cook up in a just a few minutes and the egg can stay soft and delightful. Oh well.

Perhaps this failure is what has kept me from posting something new recently, but I can assure you I've still been busy with food. I've even taken pictures when I had the self-control to keep myself from chowing down right away.

So here we have some beet greens. Well, really, lots of beet stems with some leafy stuff thrown in. After stopping by the farmer's market I picked up a lovely bundle of beets -with the greens attached. Could they not have spared me the trouble of removing them, so I wouldn't have had to suffer the emotional trauma of throwing away something green and edible? Of course, I had to at least try to cook them up, so I threw them in a skillet with some garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice. They tasted like bitter beets, but I did manage to eat most of them - probably because of what I learned reading Color Me Vegan (a total favorite by the way).  Were you aware that greens are such a storagehouse of phytonutrients because they encompass every other color? She explained it this way: think of the green tree leaves of summer compared to those in the fall - the green merely "covers" the colors, and nutrients, held within the other colors. I simply couldn't throw away my plate of carotenoids without a mental fight with myself.

Later in the week I whipped up a wonderful bean and kale ragu with a friend. Well, "whipped up" isn't exactly the right term, considering how long the kale simmers for, but I promise you it's worth it in the end - yummm! Cook it in some low-sodium vegetable broth for maximum flavor, and pair it with some crunchy whole-grain bread.

So a repeat on the pizza is a no, the beet greens, maybe, and the ragu, a definite. I won't count out the beet greens just yet, but next time I'll be sure to try them without the stems - I'll let you know how it goes!

~S