Tonight's Dinner from the Garden

Early spring is notoriously the hardest time for getting fresh food from one's garden, with the winter crops starting to fade and the high summer ones still three months away. From the culinary point of view, although the weather may be mild enough to make salad the centrepiece of a meal, one is so over cabbage-based salads by this time, and wanting to eat something a bit more summery.

I think I cracked this problem tonight, with a main dish salad based on roasted baby beetroots, raw celery, baby green leaves and fresh herbs. All from the garden, although I cheated a little on some of the greens, since I have leaf lettuces and basil growing in the greenhouse. They are still small, but big enough to steal a few leaves.

Here's the recipe (complete with energy-saving digression) if you want to try it. Or improvise from it with what you have in the garden. The beetroot is the only really essential part.


SPRING SALAD OF ROASTED BABY BEETS, GREENS AND FETA

Ingredients (for 2 servings)

6 baby beetroots, topped, tailed and well-washed
3-4 stalks celery, sliced
baby green leaves (lettuce, rocket, mesclun), torn if too large to eat whole
fresh herbs (basil, chives, chervil), torn or chopped
50 g feta cheese (organic sheep's feta is delicious)
balsamic vinegar
extra virgin olive oil

Method

Heat the oven to 220 degrees C.
Put a tablespoon of oil in a roasting dish, and roll the beets in it.
Put them in to roast for 15 minutes at full heat;
turn the oven off and let them finish cooking as the oven cools.

[This works, and saves power, which of course is what every ECO-Gardener
wants to do. Even better - and this is what I did today - is to never turn the oven on to cook only one thing. Today I started the beets off in the high heat needed to cook a batch of scones, with the beets in the middle of the oven and the tray of scones at the top. When the scones came out the oven was turned off.]

When the beets are cooked, let them cool, then skin them and slice them into
bite-sized pieces.
Add them to the salad bowl containing the celery, green leaves, herbs and crumbled feta.
Toss the salad in a dressing of one part balsamic vinegar to four parts extra virgin olive oil.