Cucumber Vodka!

So, suddenly there's all this good food in the house and it just kills me if any of it goes bad. . . which means I'm doing a lot of preserving these days. The easiest of these are the simple "turn it into a liqueur" version of preserving. Thus the cucumber vodka above. The bonus of making flavored alcohol is that the alcohol itself kills all the germs, so there's no need to do a water bath or worry about botulism or any of the other canning fears that people generally have. I will be mixing this cucumber vodka with sake in the early summer for a refreshing summer drink. I got the recipe from Infused: 100+ Recipes for Infused Liqueurs and Cocktails by Susan Elia MacNeal and Leigh Beisch, but basically you simply slice up a peeled cucumber put it into a big jar with 1 quart of vodka and leave it for a month, shaking it a few times a week. Then you strain out the cucumbers, which is what I was doing in this photo, and then put the vodka back into some pretty bottle. You have to wait another month before you can drink it. . .

Whoops!

So, I sliced up those wonderful fingerling potatoes and sauteed them in butter and served them at a dinner party.  Someone asked me what they were and I said fingerling potatoes. . . and then tasted them.  They really didn't taste like potatoes.  I tasted another one.  It tasted like artichokes.  Which is when I realized that we didn't GET potatoes this week, we'd gotten Jerusalem artichokes. 

I think I just came up with an entirely new way to serve Jerusalem artichokes!

I love BEETS?

Yes, I love beets.

It's a revelation that I've come to quite late in life. Aside from pickled red beet eggs--a midwest peculiarity if you've never had them--I've always associated beets with deprivation. When I was in middle school, my mother decided to try yet another diet. It's not that she has ever been particularly overweight, but as a buxom, curvy, and short woman in the era of Twiggy, she tried a number of different diets: grapefruit, cabbage soup, and the beet diet.

The beet diet required you to eat a cup of diced canned beets with every meal. And, no it isn't particularly effective. However, the memory of all of those tinnish, soggy beets has been so seared into my psyche that the mere mention of beets would trigger a pavlovian nausea in the very pit of my stomach--similar to drinking an entire pot of coffee without any food.

So, of course, my very first grab bag featured almost two pounds of golden beets. The horror. The whole reason I joined South Mountain was to prepare more foods in season and locally grown. Beets were definitely in season.

Exploring recipes on Epicurious and Cooks Illustrated baffled me because I couldn't believe people were waxing poetic over beet recipes that had 5 ingredients. They featured beets, they couldn't be good. Skeptical, I wrapped the beets in foil and roasted them in a 400^o oven for about an hour. I cooled, peeled, diced and added them to a salad containing feta and a red wine vinaigrette. They were simply delicious--I couldn't stop eating them. My five-year-old gobbled them up as a well. As good as that first foray into beetdom was, true nirvana was attained with the following Beet Carpaccio recipe that I slightly modified from Bon Appétit April 2003:

Beet Carpaccio

1 pound Golden Beets, roasted and sliced thinly

2 ounces Goat Cheese, crumbled

1 Shallot, minced

⅓ cup Seasoned Rice Vinegar

⅓ cup First Press Unfiltered Olive Oil

A pinch of Sugar

⅓ cup Mint, chopped

Salt and Pepper

Whisk together vinegar, olive oil, and shallot and let sit for 15 minutes. Whisk in mint and a pinch of sugar. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Arrange beets slightly overlapping in a shallow dish. Pour dressing over beets and crumble goat cheese on top.

You really must make this. It's a revelation, truly. And, it couldn't be more simple.

--Lisa