A potentially nuclear magenta soup
a nice morning for a beet photo (it's a red ace beet)
I used to hate beets – it was all about their colour. Their juice stains everything it touches a nuclear shade of magenta, a colour I find unappealing. Now that I'm gardening, beets make a great crop; they are easy to grow, nutritious, and can just be left in the ground until needed. These plusses outweighed the fact that I didn't like them, so I planted beets. I can't say they are my favourite vegetable, but I've grown to tolerate them in soup and roasted (my quest to love beets is still ongoing).
In looking for something to do with my beets, I stumbled across a recipe for 'biosphere beet soup' from Eating In: from the field to the kitchen in Biosphere 2. The recipe called for beets, a potato and a lemon. I don't grow any of my own lemons as I would need a greenhouse. However, I do have lots of beets and potatoes, so this recipe makes a great starting point for an experiment in making dinner out of what is currently in the garden.
First thing this morning, I went out and harvested the beets. Beside the beets were red carrots. These carrots were bred to contain lycopene, a health promoting nutrient, and they were red. Purple and orange carrots have been a huge success, so trying out red ones seemed like a great idea. To release the lycopene, the carrots need to be cooked and their redness wasn't as bold as I wanted (they are a rather pale red, almost pink) making them an ideal ingredient for my beets soup.
A nuti-red carrot. They grew fine, but I won't bother with them in the future as orange and purple carrots are great for munching on raw and there is plenty of lycopene in the tomatoes.
In another bed, my first successful celery crop waited to be harvested, so I cut off several stalks to put in the soup. Last spring, I had planted multiplier onions to harvest their greens. The onions did their own thing and set single bulbs, that are modest sized red onions. Several of these onions went in along with two cloves of my own garlic.
Purple potatoes seemed the obvious choice for this soup, so I included a handful of small ones. Based on my recent spaghetti squash avalanche, I've also slipped in a squash which I assume will blend in.
Everything is now in the slow cooker, along with some salt and pepper that I didn't produce. I'll puree the lot before dinner. The original recipe came to 101 calories per serving, which is rather low. It is difficult to get a lot of calories out of garden produce. I think I'll fry up a couple of eggs from my hens to round out the meal. That's as local as I can get.