It is out with the old and in with the new here. Out (hopefully) with the beets that are still sitting in my fridge from winter. I generally hate beets, although we got a ton of them from our CSA this winter. I’m always trying to figure out what to do with them. Arp will eat them, but I can only serve him so many meals of roasted beets in one week, and that doesn’t really get rid of all the beets we have to go through in order to use what our CSA gives us. So I’ve been on a quest to find recipes where beets are tolerable. Here’s one of them:

It is a recipe for beet pancakes that I developed from the recipe in Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious. I had to mess with the recipe quite a bit in order to get in some whole grain flour, and also to avoid using a boxed pancake mix, which I never buy. So I combined a recipe for pancakes from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook with Seinfeld’s, adding in some oat flour, and this is what I got. Not bad. And my kids had no idea it had beets until I told them. Seinfeld’s recipe was also lacking in spices, so I basically upped all the pumpkin pie-type spices.

This has got to be the best recipe for beets that I have yet to discover, Beet Cucumber Gazpacho:

It is soooooo yummy, and you can barely taste the beets. It tastes more like the other stuff – cilantro, cumin, cucumbers, red bell peppers, lime juice and tomatoes.

I was at the grocery store the other day, and if you saw what I did when I saw the pile of rhubarb, you’d have considered calling to get me some kind of mental help. My mouth dropped open, I gave a bizarre sort of yelp, and literally ran to the table. I grabbed two huge packages of rhubarb along with 3 lbs. of strawberries. Where rhubarb is concerned, I refuse to let anyone say that I go into this only halfway. Considering how early it is, I’m doubting that the rhubarb was local. The strawberries weren’t local yet either. I feel a tiny bit guilty about that, as I’ve been doing great relying on mostly local produce since last Spring, when my CSA began. But the CSA is on hiatus until June, so I’ve been using the supermarket for the last few weeks. Besides, I would have to wonder about a person who can resist the first rhubarb of Spring, no matter where it comes from.

So I ran home and promptly made a strawberry rhubarb pie. Secret ingredient: Cointreau.

And then the next day, I made rhubarb muffins.

A few days after that, I made a rhubarb berry crisp. No picture of that one. Can you tell I like rhubarb? That is one thing I’m betting I’m going to miss in Costa Rica, unless they import it.

And finally, here is a yummy Indian shrimp dish that I mostly created. I’ll call it Bengali-style Mustard Shrimp:

I say that I mostly created this recipe because I learned the basic technique from my mother-in-law. But I created this particular recipe on the fly, which I am very proud of. It’s taken me many years of being married to an Indian man to be able to cook decent Indian food on the fly. I think I might type up this basic recipe and post it at some point.