Portland Farmer's Market at PSU and Beet Greens

This obviously isn't a picture of my groceries; I DID go to the farmer's market but I dashed to lab directly after and when I came home I completely forgot to take pictures before cooking up my beet greens.  There wasn't much to see this week anyway, because I'm leaving Wednesday night for San Diego and didn't want to buy too much.  Of last week's groceries, I still have some gouda and a bunch of purple kale left.  This week I hauled home:

1 bunch beet greens with tiny attached beets: $3

1 bunch dandelion greens (I think that's what they were....): $2.50

3 heirloom fuji apples and 2 red anjou pears: $4.10

Total: $9.10

I really miss my regular fruit people.  At this point I'm starting to think they've left the farmer's market permanently.  Yesterday I woke up a bit late (10am) and didn't get to the farmer's market until around 1pm, which was a big mistake!  Almost all of the fuji apples were gone and I had to pick up these "heirloom" apples instead.  This sounds fancy, but the color is a muddy green and the flavor is nowhere near as delicious in my opinion.  The price though, was better at $1 per pound instead of $1.99.

Beet greens are a wonder and I'm making plans in my head to plant some next year.  The tiny beets are perfectly tasty roasted and the tops have a spinach flavor, without that feeling in your mouth you get sometimes with spinach.  How to explain...sometimes you eat spinach and your teeth feel rough.  I think you know what I mean.  The beet leaves are just a bit sturdier than spinach too and cook up to a nice texture.  And thankfully, the stems are tender, unlike kale or chard stems.  I did my favorite thing with the greens, which was to fry them up with garlic, cooked sprouted brown rice and chickpeas (dashes of soy sauce and a couple of pinches of sugar) and the reddish juice from the leaves colored my rice a little, which was rather pretty.

Roasted Baby Beets

Preheat oven to 350.  Rub the clean beets with a bit of olive oil and then seal in a foil packet.  Roast for maybe 45min to 1 hour until tender, depending on size of your beets.  Rub the beets with your hands to remove the skins and enjoy the little nuggets.