The Next Batch

Sunday morning a week ago I was really excited. I’d used my weekend time wisely and gotten lots of chores done around the house, my summer clothes took the place of my winter ones in the closet and I’d gotten two nights of good sleep. Emboldened by my success, I set out to work on my weekly blog posts.

Monday’s came out easy. I always like to write about life transitions, it makes me feel better and gain a sense of closure. On a role, I moved on to cooking something intended for that Wednesday. I’ve been eating pretty badly these past couple weeks. When I’m stressed the last thing I want to do is get organized and cook something, so I tend to make bad decisions and reach for whatever is convenient and yummy. Two weeks ago I even ate a McDonald’s hamburger. I haven’t done that in over a year.

Healthy snacks! Yes, let’s make some of those. I’ve toyed with the idea of making kale chips before, but a recipe for beet chips caught my eye. Cheap, good for me and the recipe promised I would never know the difference……awesome sauce.

To get that “chip” feel, the recipe instructed me to slice the beets thinly with a mandolin. I have a handheld mandolin that I thought would work great. Wrong. The mandolin would slice the beets thinly, but I couldn’t get a full slice. It would give me basically half a chip. Weird. I’ll slice them with a knife I thought. Wrong. The slices were three times the width of the mandolin ones. Then when it came to the leftover section I just cut them into cubes. In the end I had three different size pieces of beet heading for the oven.

They seemed to take forever to cook so eventually I jacked up the temperature and managed to burn the thin pieces, cook the thick slices and leave the cubed pieces very soggy. Lovely. I also started photographing at a weird time of day when the light changes quite a bit. So my first photographs are from the kitchen table, but I had to move outside once they came out of the oven.

All in all a big old mess, But dammit, I was going to post my burnt pieces and move on. Sometimes things don't go perfectly, and all my recipes don't work out. I'm honestly just happy I was able to get back to blogging. I really love it. Sometimes the world just takes over when there are big changes and your brain can't get to everything. Since I got this up, hopefully it means we're back to normal. Thanks for hanging in you guys! Hoping my next batch is better. 

In case you want to try your hand at baked beet chips.....

Slice a beet into very thin slices. Toss in olive oil and pepper and bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. I topped with some rosemary and ate even the burnt bits.