My Dad Beets All the Rest

Firstly, sorry for being away for so long.  I realised I needed to catch up on my blog when even my Dad mentioned that I hadn't updated it for a while!  Work has been busy and my weekends have been taken up with a short photography course (the results may not be obvious for a while as I need to practice what I've learnt!).

This weekend has been lovely.  I took Friday off to make the Bank Holiday weekend a day longer and spent it with my sisters, Sarah and Claire, and my gorgeous nephew Ben in Tunbridge Wells. 

Today I started with a run, and finished with cooking from Nigel Slater's Tender.  In between, I managed to pick some delicious Victoria plums from a local fruit farm, buy some lovely produce from my favourite organic farm and also visit my parents where I had my pick of their home-grown produce.  They have been eagerly awaiting the first of the beetroot, and I was lucky enough to get the cream of the crop.  This beauty weighed in at 350g and I had to scour my recipe books to find a recipe to do it justice.

Nigel Slater's Tender Volume 1 is a beautiful book.  Think of a home-grown vegetable (in the UK) and there is a whole chapeter dedicated to it with notes on growing, harvesting, cooking and eating.  Here I found a lovely recipe for Chickpea Patties with Beetroot Tzatsiki.  The patties were made by blitzing chickpeas with ground cumin, coriander, paprika, garlic and an egg with some flat leaf parsley and fresh mint (also from Mum and Dad's garden) in the food processor, then shaping and frying in a little olive oil.  The tzatsiki from finely grating the beetroot and mixing with natural yoghurt and fresh mint.   Both served with a wedge of lemon.  Delicious.

My parents maintain that there is no favouritism in our family.  The order goes as follows:

Sarah - first born, so pretty special

Claire - third (and youngest) daughter, and mother of my parents' first grandchild, so also pretty special

Dominic - youngest child, only son, and soon to be father of my parents' second grandchild, so also pretty special

Me, I'm the second born... middle daughter... I regularly visit with my cakes and cookies...  BUT I was given the first beetroot, so I guess that makes me pretty special too.

My Dad x