Some quick things:

• Want to receive this list via email each week? Sign up here.
• No fresh bread Thursday, but we’ve got a good freezer stash of McGrath’s Original, Sesame Original, and Prairie Bread.
• BUTTER BLOWOUT continues — Apple Valley Creamery’s grass-fed butter is on sale for $7/tub (usually $8.50).
• Once again, we think we’ve requested enough of the Knead Pizza Kits to ensure a more reliable stock — but you blew us away last week with your love for them, so again, please bear with us while we figure out just how many we need (and Knead scurries to make them)!
• A big thank you to everyone who commented with or sent in beet ideas! Click that link to see many of them compiled onto one page for your perusing pleasure.

Scroll down for the full list of what we’ll have this week!

Following last week’s post, in which I posed a beet challenge, I resolved to make at least one beet dish unlike anything I’d ever done before. Truthfully, it didn’t seem that hard, because probably 99% of the beets I’ve made in my life have been roasted before they received whatever additional treatment they were going to get (I mean, not counting the beets I’ve just grated raw on salads). Surely, I thought, there’s something to be done other than roasting them?

One of the first Facebook comments on last week’s post mentioned Beet Reubens. “WHOA!” I thought, “That sounds great!” And so I decided to make it.

But we didn’t have any Swiss cheese in the house, and I felt a little paralyzed about how I should cook the beets — roasting them was the obvious choice, but what about slicing them thin and salt-pickling them and not cooking them at all? And would that be cheating on my intention to do something other than roasting them?

So I hemmed and hawed and looked through a dozen cookbooks and scrolled through pages and pages of recipes on Eat Your Books, and eventually found a Mark Bittman recipe for Beet Rösti, a spin on a classic Swiss potato pancake.

The Rösti calls for grated beets, cooked in a skillet in pancake form. Easy, much quicker than roasting, and though not super fancy or exotic, unlike anything I’ve done with beets before. So I did it!

As expected, it’s not super fancy, and it’s not, like, knock-your-socks-off amazing. But it is solidly good, and it’s versatile enough that the leftovers became my breakfast the next day, and I enjoyed it that way — with yogurt and honey — just as much as I had the night before. So I wrote up our adaptation of the recipe, which you can find here. Full disclosure: the breakfast leftovers came about because I started with two pounds of beets — with one pound, it would have been enough to serve the two of us as a substantial side, or three or four as a lighter side.

Anyway! I had great fun with the beet challenge, and I enjoyed hearing everyone’s ideas so much that I’ve compiled them into a little beet-spiration page.

As promised, I’d like to do this again, but for sweet potatoes. This time it feels a little harder to me to do something so unlike anything I’ve done before in terms of cooking method, so for myself, I’m thinking primarily about new flavors, or new ways of using them. One of the first recipes to catch my fancy is this one for Sweet Potatoes with Orange Bitters, from Ruth Reichl via Yotam Ottolenghi. I’ll grab some fresh-squeezed juice from Peach Ridge down at the other end of the market, making that pretty super easy. And then, maybe in a totally different vein, Sweet Potato Macaroni & Cheese from Nigella Lawson. (I also saw one from a non-Nigella source that looked similar, but also called for spinach; I’m not opposed to adding a little more green to my crazy decadent comfort foods!) What other ideas do you have? What are your standby favorites that might not seem so obvious, or what new ideas have you been pondering?

Unrelated to sweet potatoes or beets, I’ve had this recipe for Honey & Smoked Paprika Roasted Carrots with Chorizo, Chickpeas, and Dates sitting on my desk for a few days. I thought last night was the night, but we didn’t have any chickpeas. Chickpeas are now acquired, but it’s late enough tonight and Dusty and I are still both working that it looks like we’re reaching into the freezer for some soup we froze over the summer. But I’m going to make it soon! I’m going to use the North Mountain Pastures Chorizo, even though it’s not Spanish-style, and maybe some dried cherries we have languishing in the pantry instead of the dates, but everything else I think we have on hand or can get from the market, which is my favorite kind of meal to make. I’ll let you know — unless you beat me to it, in which case please let me know!

-Julia

P.S. If you’re thinking about corning your own beef for St. Patrick’s Day, this is the week to grab your roast! Though brisket is traditional, Michael Ruhlman thinks chuck roast is the way to go!

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Produce

[one_half]Fruit

• Fuji Apples
• Granny Smith Apples
• Pink Lady Apples

Herbs

• Parsley

Mushrooms

• Cremini
• White
• Shiitake
• Oyster
• Lions Mane

Onions & Garlic

• • Really Ugly Garlic
  • Red Onions
  • Yellow Onions
  • Shallots

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Potatoes

• Yukon Gold Potatoes
• Sweet Potatoes
• Japanese Sweet Potatoes

Roots

• Red Beets
• Carrots – ugly, regular, and small
• Jerusalem Artichokes
• Daikon Radishes
• Purple Radishes
• Rutabagas (somewhat limited)
• Purple Top Turnips

Salad Greens 

• Mesclun Mix
• Mixed Baby Kale
• Baby Spinach

Squash

• Butternut Squash (cubed only, maybe limited)[/one_half_last]

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Bread

[one_half]McGrath’s Brick Oven Bakehouse
(fresh Friday & Saturday)

• McGrath’s Original
• Sesame Original
• Irish Oatmeal Pan Bread
• American Harvest
• Parmesan Olive Herb
• Prairie
• Baguettes (available frozen only)

[/one_half][one_half_last]Talking Breads
(fresh Thursday)available frozen only this week

• Batard
• Ciabatta
• Miche
• Seeded

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