Veggie Sandwiches with Walnut Pesto, Roasted Beets and Walnuts, and Sautéed Beet Greens

I actually made this pesto last weekend when I got fresh sweet basil from the farmer's market. I guess I got lazy, then went off on tangents, posting about other things. I remembered as we had these sandwiches again over the weekend to use up the remaining pesto that I had never posted about it!

This is a very basic pesto recipe, nothing special. This was my first time ever making pesto at home and it turned out really well. I used walnuts instead of pine nuts in our pesto as walnuts are far more abundant in the Midwest than pine nuts and are thus much cheaper. I feel a little silly for buying walnuts though as walnut tress grow all over the place in Missouri, I'm just unsure as I don't know what, if anything, they've been sprayed with. People and their stupid chemicals have to ruin all the wild food out there.

When we had these sandwiches over the weekend, I also prepared some beets as sides. I roasted the beetroots drizzled with a little olive oil at 400(F) for about an hour and a half and tossed them with some chopped walnuts and salt and pepper. I also made Sautéed Beet Greens again, this time I used malt vinegar and it was much better, I will edit the recipe. The roasted beets and walnuts weren't the greatest. We made them better by eating the beetroots with the beet greens. It was worth a shot, but we won't be doing that with the beets again.

Anyways, had I not been lazy, I would have made the focaccia that Jessy posted about awhile back, but alas I was being lazy, so both times we made these sandwiches, we just bought a petite loaf of multigrain bread.

Walnut Pesto

2-3 cups fresh sweet basil

1/3 cup walnuts

3 cloves of garlic, peeled

1/2 cup good olive oil

pinch white pepper

pinch salt

Combine all ingredients together in a food processor.

I slathered some pesto on both pieces of the bread (which was warm), I layered on fresh spinach, onions, artichoke hearts (these are optional, we used them the first time we had these as we had a can lying around, we didn't use artichoke hearts the second time we had these), and tomato.

These were the sides. I really like beet greens a lot. I'm thinking that over the winter, we should attempt to grow baby beets, so we'll still get lots of greens, but won't have near as large of beet roots to work with.

'Til next time.

Garden Update #11

The gardens are finally really starting to move along. We've actually had a few days reprieve from rain (I say this as rain clouds are moving in.), and lots of sunshine.

We also seem to have found an effective remedy for the aphids. After trying three different natural concoctions, we've found that a mixture of boiled crushed garlic and cayenne pepper is not only effective against aphids, but also truly safe for the plants.

I forgot to mention that we harvested the chard a few weeks ago, it was yummy.

The wind was cooperating with me this morning, so I finally got some decent garden pictures for the first time in a few weeks.

Check out the container garden:



















































The broccoli, still going strong. I'm worried that they may be underpotted or something. They still aren't producing and I'm afraid it's going to be too hot soon.















Hungarian Wax Pepper. This thing is flippin' huge!















Banana pepper, the plant is finally growing, for awhile, it seemed as though it was expending all its enegy on growing this one pepper.















Jalapeno pepper.



















Cayenne peppers. I hope you can tell in this picture that this thing is going nuts! There are six or seven large peppers growing right now.



























A couple pictures of the serrano pepper. It's really growing like crazy right now too, last count we had nine little peppers starting.















Tons of flowers on the 'Super Chile'.

Onto the community garden. I was hoping that the hay would help keep down on the weeds, but there were still tons of weeds, what they hay does do is make the weeds harder to pull.

All in all things are going well. I wish I knew more though, such as which bugs are beneficial and which are pests, as we have an assortment of critters in both the container and community garden. I know at least some of our visitors are 'pests', as they have had made a few meals out of our leaves. I also wish I knew why other people's plants are so much farther along than ours, perhaps it is what they are fertilizing their plants with, it could be that our plot sucks. You see, we didn't really think much about what plot we chose, and we ended up chosing possibly the worst plot there was, the one that gets the runoff from everyone else's plots.

Speaking of other people's plants, check out these guys, they are some plants in other plots. It not only illustrates how much further their plants are than ours, but also how cute baby vegetables are.

These yellow squash are almost ready to be picked!

Onto to this weeks CSA and farmer's market booty.















This weeks CSA includes: beets, broccoli, collard greens, onions, spinach, spearmint, and leaf lettuce.

Farmer's market booty: We've got local cherries (these are a special treat, they don't last long and aren't always available, a splurge and a very exciting find!), organic spinach (I love Phil's Phine Greens, Phil is a local purveyor of greens and they are phine :-), he has some of the best stuff around), cucumber, lots of little tomatoes, and snow peas.

As noted above, we got some beets in our CSA this week. Now I like beets, but have never bought them fresh before, so I wasn't sure how to store them. After a little searching online, I found out not only how to store them, but that beet greens are edible and incredibly nutritious. Since I had been planning on discarding the greens anyway, I decided to try eating them. I looked around for a recipe and modified it to our tastes. It was pretty good, the greens are sweet and taste, well, an awful lot like beets.

Sautéed Beet Greens
2-3 cups of beet greens, washed and chopped
1 clove of garlic, minced
2 tsp organic sugar
a few shakes of crushed red pepper
a few splashes of malt vinegar

Heat a few tablespoons of water in a small skillet. Add the greens and the garlic and cook for about 8 minutes.

Stir in the sugar, crushed red pepper, and vinegar. Cook for an additional 10 minutes.

This made a nice lunch side dish, it was surprisingly tasty, and I will never waste beet greens now that I know what to do with them!

'Til next time!