Slow Cooker Harvard Beets - A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Box Recipe

Two of my later CSA boxes had 1-pound bags of beets in them.  Now, I LOVE beets, but nobody else in my family is a fan of cooked (hot) beets.  That Girl and I both are pickled beet fiends, but I’m pretty sure I’m the Hot Beet Queen (now THERE’S a mental image).  

When I eat at an MCL cafeteria in Indianapolis, I can guarantee that at least one of my side dishes will be Harvard beets.  (Yes, I often choose to have TWO orders of Harvard beets - you wanna make something of it?)

I was browsing one of my untouched cookbooks, Taste of Home's Slow Cooker Throughout the Year, and came across this easy recipe for Harvard beets in a slow cooker:



Slow Cooker Harvard Beets

2 pounds small fresh beets, peeled and halved
1/2 c sugar
1/4 c packed brown sugar
2 T cornstarch
1/2 t salt
1/4 c orange juice
1/4 c vinegar
2 T butter
1 t whole cloves

Place beets in a 3-quart slow cooker.  In a bowl, combine the sugar, brown sugar, cornstarch, salt, orange juice, and vinegar. Pour over the beets in the slow cooker, then dot with the butter.  Place the cloves on a double thickness of cheesecloth, bring up the corners, and tie with string.  Place the clove bag in the slow cooker.  Cover and cook on low for 7 to 8 hours, or until tender.  Discard the clove bag.

VALUE (A Five-Minute Friday Post)

I have a big family dinner on Thanksgiving.  I start on Friday, buying the turkey and putting it into a big cooler with some ice to thaw.  It is a BIG cooler for the BIG turkey.  This year’s was typical - twenty-six pounds.

You’re supposed to buy a turkey of about one pound per expected person.  We had twenty people, and my choice was limited to the single twenty-six-pound bird and a flock of measly little fourteen-pounders.  My oven isn’t big enough to roast two turkeys, so…!

I use oven roasting bags because they make the turkey cook a little faster and you don’t have to worry about having a tall enough covered roaster.  The bags say they’ll hold a turkey up to twenty-four pounds, but I can make my monsters fit.

I bought the turkey on Friday.  I finished my grocery shopping on Saturday, put the leaf in the table and made cranberry gelatin salad and deviled eggs on Monday, roasted the turkey, got out all the serving pieces, and cleaned the house on Tuesday.  Wednesday, I carved the turkey, baked pies, and cleaned some more.  Thursday, I made the gravy, assembled and cooked the side dishes, baked the rolls, and got ready for the ravening hordes.

They came, they saw, they ate, and ate, and ATE.  As is the custom, by the end of it all, we were all blissfully miserable.

Why do we do this every year?  Because we value family - all of them!  The crazy and the annoying.  The one who volunteers to bring three things, brings eight, and burns the one thing you really, really counted on.  Oh well.  It is what it is, and what it is, is family.

Now THAT’S value!

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This post is part of the Five-Minute Friday link-up.  Today's writing prompt was "VALUE."  For more information on Five-Minute Friday, click here.

What I've Been Reading - Dear Mrs. Bird by A. J. Pearce

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!  I felt as if I were in wartime London during the Blitz.  I simply couldn't put it down.   By turns funny, intense, engaging, sad, and ultimately, hopeful.  I'd like to read more about the characters the author created.  

The author was inspired by a chance discovery of a copy of a women's magazine from 1939 and its advice column.

Here's part of the book description on goodreads.com

"London 1940, bombs are falling. Emmy Lake is Doing Her Bit for the war effort, volunteering as a telephone operator with the Auxiliary Fire Services. When Emmy sees an advertisement for a job at the London Evening Chronicle, her dreams of becoming a Lady War Correspondent seem suddenly achievable. But the job turns out to be typist to the fierce and renowned advice columnist, Henrietta Bird. Emmy is disappointed, but gamely bucks up and buckles down.

"Mrs. Bird is very clear: Any letters containing Unpleasantness—must go straight in the bin. But when Emmy reads poignant letters from women who are lonely, may have Gone Too Far with the wrong men and found themselves in trouble, or who can’t bear to let their children be evacuated, she is unable to resist responding. As the German planes make their nightly raids, and London picks up the smoldering pieces each morning, Emmy secretly begins to write letters back to the women of all ages who have spilled out their troubles."

Candied Carrots, and My Eighth and Ninth Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Boxes Continued!

My last two CSA boxes included a boat load of carrots!  Oh my!  What to do with all those orange spears?  

I let them languish in the crisper drawer in the fridge through my trip with my sister to the Lake of the Ozarks, and through the washing machine bearing repair week, and through the bring-the-boat-home weekend.  

Last week I decided to do something with the carrots, so I gathered up all the bags I had, dumped them onto the counter, peeled them, and put them into a large storage container.  

I ate quite a few of them raw, and they were great!  But enough raw carrots is enough, so I decided to cook some one night.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy!  But a little dull.  I wanted something just a little more than plain old cooked carrots.  So I got online and found a recipe for candied carrots, and here it is…



Candied Carrots

1 lb carrots, peeled, and cut into one-inch to two-inch pieces
2 T butter, diced (so it melts faster)
1/4 c packed brown sugar

Put the carrots in a saucepan and cover with lightly salted water.  Bring to a boil then turn down and simmer about 20 minutes or until fork tender (not mushy!).  Drain off the cooking water, then add the butter and brown sugar to the carrots in the pan.  Stir it all up, and cook on low heat until the sugar in the bottom of the pan is bubbly (about three to five minutes).  Serve them warm!

ONE (A Five-Minute Friday Post)

One is the loneliest number you can ever do.
Two can be as bad as one.  It’s the loneliest number since the number one.
     - Three Dog Night


One is supposed to be lonely.  That’s what the song says.

But you know what?  Most of the time, I don’t mind being alone.  I can be lonely in the middle of a crowd.  I like being with my friends, but I don’t NEED to be with people all the time.  As an introvert, I need breaks from people; otherwise, my social tolerance is exhausted.

To me, ONE is the number for recovery of equilibrium.  ONE means I can choose to be, go, and do whatever and wherever I choose.

The more people involved, the more difficult it is to decide anything!  Where to eat, what to do, where to go.  Talk about a bottleneck!  With everyone’s conflicting food preferences, allergies, caloric restrictions, and usual meal times, it can end up with nobody happy and everyone irritated.

So ONE is re-energizing.  Give me time alone, and then I’ll be excited to be social again.  Just don’t expect me to do it indefinitely - you’ll be sorry!

HAHA!

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This post is part of the Five-Minute Friday link-up.  Today's writing prompt was "ONE."  For more information on Five-Minute Friday, click here.

The Jet in My Laundry Room (More Adventures in Home Ownership)

That Man walked into the house from working in the garage and asked, “Isn't the washing machine kind of loud? It sounds like bad bearings.”

I had started a load of laundry, and the machine was going through a spin cycle.  I had noticed a few days earlier how loud it seemed, but I wasn’t positive.  I could be imagining it, right?

Well, here’s your sign.

That Man said, “Well, do you want to buy a new washer?”

Oh, no.  I’d REALLY rather not!  But, another unplanned project - oh, joy.

So I powered up the computer and Googled “Whirlpool Cabrio washing machine loud spin cycle.”  I read some articles (most described the sound as a jet getting ready to take off) and watched some YouTube videos and eventually bought a repair kit on eBay.  It included a drive shaft, upper and lower bearings, a seal, adhesive, grease, and installation tools.  They would arrive by the end of the week.

The old drive shaft

The following Sunday, immediately after church, we began.

I pulled up a couple of YouTube videos and we watched guys open up the top of a washing machine.  Not the lid, mind you, but the entire top of the machine.  One guy, in what was supposed to be a training video, working on an obviously new, pristine machine, took a putty knife, slid it into the narrow crevice of the machine top, released the catches (one, two!), and popped the top open - voila!  Like magic!  So easy!  Another guy, obviously working in his garage told us the catches were hard to release, and to not use the standard flexible putty knife, but to use a stiffer putty knife or a flat screwdriver to get at those stubborn catches.

He was right.

The top was eventually opened, the ring around the top of the tub where the detergent, fabic softener, and bleach dispensers are was removed, and the sorta-kinda agitator bump in the bottom of the machine was also removed.

Now all we had to do, according to the training video was to reach under the lip of the tub and lift it out - easy peasy!!!

We worked at that for a couple of hours.  HOURS.  Yes.  Hours.

That Man periodically asked me whether I wouldn't rather just buy a new washing machine.  But by now, we were committed, by gosh!  We are not quitters!  That stupid machine was NOT going to win!

I went to the garage guy’s video.  He said he had trouble getting the tub out.

No!  Surely not!  You’re kidding, right?

But he had a solution, involving a car jack and a piece of 4x4 lumber.  We worked at that for a bit, using the jack from one of our cars, and a scrap piece of 4x4, but got nowhere because of how the jack’s base was shaped.  That Man retrieved a bottle jack from the garage and we tried again.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

It was like magic!  The jack and 4x4 got the tub released from the drive shaft, and out came the tub, just as easily as the training video showed.  Then we turned the washer on its side so That Man could knock out the drive shaft and bearings.  There was more to it than just that, but by that point of the process, it went pretty smoothly.

One thing about the garage guy’s video - after he got the tub out, he said he could hear water sloshing around, apparently trapped inside the tub walls.  He couldn’t figure out how to drain it, so he intended to DRILL SOME HOLES IN THE TUB to get the water out!  NO! NoNoNoNoNo!  That water is part of how the washer balances the load during spin cycles!  I hope he didn’t do it.  All that work, and then to ruin the machine.

Anyway, back to us.  The reassembly went well until it was time to install the seal.  It wasn’t the same on both sides!  All right, which side goes which way?  I looked at more videos and examined the old seal and drive shaft closely, and figured it out to MY satisfaction.  So I got the dubious honor of greasing and putting adhesive on the seal and installing it.  According to That Man, that’s so if it had been done incorrectly and the washer leaked all over the floor, the fiasco could be blamed on ME!

After getting it all put back together, one of the videos said not to run a load through the washer for 24 hours.  I waited two days.  Oh, the suspense!!!

I ran a short cycle with no clothes to test it out.  It was quieter and no leaks!  But it was just sloshing water around.  I needed a real world test - jeans. So I loaded it up and ran a normal cycle.  I stood there and watched it during the first spin cycle.

It was quiet.  There were no leaks.  It powered through the whole cycle and worked like a champ!

It took us about eight hours to do what is supposedly a four-hour job.  But we did it ourselves, and we saved a ton of dough!  Instead of buying a comparable new washing machine for $700.00 or $800.00 (MSRP of about $1,100.00) on sale at Lowe’s - yes, that’s JUST the washer - I checked, we paid less than $76.00 for the repair kit.  And if we’d had someone come fix it, we still would have probably been charged about $400.00 for the repair.

Yes, our time and effort are worth something, but we learned some things, got the satisfaction of doing it ourselves, and saved $325.00 to $725.00 to boot!

It WAS worth it!

Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage, and My Eighth and Ninth Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Boxes - What I Got (The Late Reveal!)

The Eighth Box

I obviously received my eighth and ninth CSA boxes a while back, but I just had to complete the series and show you what my last two boxes contained!

The eighth box included tomatoes, sweet peppers, onions, carrots, and beets, and the ninth box, tomatoes, sweet peppers, potatoes, and carrots - lots of carrots!

I've chopped and frozen most of the onions and peppers, and eaten the tomatoes and potatoes, and some of the carrots (raw).

I still have some of the onions, all the beets, and a lot of the carrots.  I have plans for the beets and carrots, and you'll hear about them in time.

But today, I used one of the onions.  I never got to an Oktoberfest celebration this year - it rained and rained, and I wasn't going to wade through the mud.  I can wait until next year.

In the meantime, I decided to make German cuisine in my own kitchen.  

Today I was inspired to make red cabbage.  The recipe I use is called Rhineland Sweet-Sour Red Cabbage from the original Crockery Cookery cookbook, written by Mabel Hoffman.  YUM!  I've had a hankering for it for weeks, so I went a little crazy and made it.  I'll have a couple of other German recipes in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

The onion came from one of my CSA boxes, but the red cabbage, alas, did not  We never received any cabbage, red or green, so I bit the bullet and headed to the store to buy a couple of heads.  It's a simple, foolproof way to make delicious red cabbage.  

Here's the recipe (my paraphrase):

Rhineland Sweet-Sour Red Cabbage (6 to 8 servings)

6 slices bacon, cooked and chopped (reserve 3 T bacon grease in the skillet)*
1 large head red cabbage, shredded
1 medium onion, chopped
6 T brown sugar
3 T flour
2 t salt
1/4 t pepper
3/4 c water
6 T vinegar

Put the cabbage, onion, and bacon in a 3 1/2- or 4-quart slow cooker.  Mix together the bacon grease, sugar, flour, salt, and pepper.  Stir in the water and vinegar.  Pour over the cabbage, onion, and bacon in the slow cooker.  Cover and cook on low 4 hours.  If the cabbage isn't cooked to your liking, turn the heat up to high for 1/2 hour.  Stir and serve.

*If you want the preparation to go even faster, here's a shortcut - chop up 6 slices of pre-cooked bacon and put it in the slow cooker with the cabbage and onion, and use 3 T of vegetable oil instead of the bacon grease.

BURDEN (A Five-Minute Friday post)

I remember my parents saying they never wanted to be a burden on anyone.  They had it all planned.  They had their finances in order, they traveled, they took part in their activities, they had FUN.

But then Mom started being afraid to drive, to get her hair done, to go out of the house, to have us visit.  She didn’t want Dad to go out, either.  She was afraid for him to leave her.  She was suffering from crippling anxiety. 

At the end, Dad was sitting with her all day, from early in the morning until late at night.  He didn’t have time to bathe, do his shopping, pay his taxes, or any of the things he enjoyed.  My sister and I spent alternate weekends sitting with Mom so she would have someone with her and he could get out and do the things he needed to do.  She didn’t like it much.  She really wanted HIM, not us. 

But, no matter how demanding she became, he stayed by her side. 

He never considered her to be a burden.

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This post is part of the Five-Minute Friday link-up.  Today's writing prompt was "BURDEN."  For more information on Five-Minute Friday, click here.

What I’ve Been Reading - Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt. I hate depression. I am scared of it. Terrified, in fact. But at the same time, it has made me who I am. And if - for me - it is the price of feeling life, it's a price always worth paying.

          - Matt Haig in Reasons to Stay Alive

At age 24, Matt Haig nearly jumped off a cliff.  He has lived with depression and anxiety for many years.  

This book surprised me.  Matt Haig describes his descent into depression and anxiety and how he climbed out of the hole and learned to live with them.  It’s not long, but there’s a lot packed into it.  If you or someone you love live with depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, or any mental illness, this book will give you hope.  If you don’t, there’s a lot to be learned about what it’s like to live with mental illness.  

He talks about what it feels like to be depressed and anxious.  There’s no pyscho-babble here - just the experiences and thoughts of a survivor.  I especially liked his lists - famous people who have/had mental illness, tweets from ordinary people about ways to deal, what helps (apparently peanut butter sandwiches and country music!), and what doesn’t.

This isn’t a sad book.  On the contrary, he looks at his depression and anxiety as part of what has made him who he is.  And he sees humor in his life.  There is a lot of good advice for everyone (”If the sun is shining, go outside.”) in the lists.  I’m working on my own list.

If you can find the audiobook, get it.  He reads it himself, and it’s excellent!

REPEAT (A Five Minute Friday Post)

All last month, and all this month, too, I'm following a routine -  sit, write, repeat.  I didn't write consistently last month, but did it in clumps.  I got behind, and I had to really get it in gear to finish all thirty-one posts by the end of the month.  So, I had to write and post several at a time.  When the challenge comes around again next year, I'll improve.

So far this month, I've written every day.  That's not saying much, because this is only the fourth day of the month, but I've kept to my schedule.  Yay me!

Consistency is the key.  All I have to do is sit, write, repeat, day after day.

Long-term consistency trumps short-term intensity.
          - Bruce Lee

What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.
          - Gretchen Rubin

Great ideas!  All I have to do is apply them. 

Repeatedly.

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This post is part of the Five-Minute Friday link-up.  Today's writing prompt was "REPEAT."  For more information on Five-Minute Friday, click here.