I didn't come to like beets until my 40s, well past the age when we're supposed to have grown up tastes already.

Toasted walnuts...creamy goat cheese...

Beets are amazing. I remember that one time I read how much they lower blood pressure, so I made my own beet juice and drank it. I think my bp dropped about 20 points!

Thanks for sharing your story, NRaleighLiberal. It is always fun to see what others are doing with the results of their gardening.



Cher

beets seem really expensive here. A bunch of them at the supermarket only has three beets in it, and costs about $4. If I'm gonna roast beets, I want to do more than three of them!

BTW, what temp do you roast tomatoes at? I have about twenty big fat romas right now and need to do something with them. And how do you store yours?

We make roasted sauce this way:

put some olive oil, chopped garlic, a diced onion, diced sweet pepper in a big oblong roasting pan. Cut up the tomatoes into quarters (remove the stem/core part) - add some pepper and salt, mix it up, and roast at 300 for a few hours, stirring every now and then until it is reduced to the consistency you like. Easy!

Store sauce or tomatoes? For tomatoes, we make roasted sauce and can it, can the whole tomatoes - if we had the space we would just put them whole in freezer bags and freeze them. Mostly, we eat them endlessly while they are coming in from the garden!

for what I call "tomato chewies." I slice them and roast them in that slow oven for hours. I check to see when they should come out. The deep, rich taste cannot be described!

I read about another method--to roast at 175 and leave the oven door partially open.

Interesting about beet prices. They are not expensive at all here. $1.59 for a bunch of three. Of course, this is at the Korean greengrocer. They would be more expensive at the supermarket.

I am growing some this year. Chiogga, I believe.


Cher

How long to roast the beets?