Beets, Scapes and Bok Choy - OH MY!

I tried two new recipes and modified another one for dinner tonight. Everything turned out GREAT and the best part, every dish contained an item from my farm share this week!

First, as a side dish, I made Quick Pickled Beets . Aside from being in love with Martha Stewart's craftiness and her eye for "good things", I really like her recipes. There was a huge gallery of recipes just for beets on her website. I did take special care not to turn my kitchen beet-red and the preparation was super easy. It takes about a 1/2 hour for the beets to cook on the stove, but vinegary kick of the final dish was worth the wait.

Second, I figured out what to do with garlic scapes... make PESTO!! I found a recipe for Garlic Scape Basil Pesto and ran out to my garden to snip a few leaves off my basil plants. This is another easy recipe, but do not be tempted to add any extra garlic to this recipe because the scapes really have enough flavor, but you can add pine nuts, even though they are not listed. The pesto was really nice on a fresh baguette, but I had bigger plans.

Enter recipe #3 - Broccoli, Tomato and Mozzarella Stromboli from my go-to-gal, Martha. I made a few changes to the recipe and they really paid off. I kept the broccoli and mozzarella in my stromboli and omitted the garlic, marinara and salami. Instead, I added my garlic scape pesto and bok choy. Since I was using fresh broccoli and bok choy, I chopped them into 1 inch pieces, steamed the broccoli and bok choy stems for 3 minutes and the bok choy leaves for 1 minute. I dumped the veg into a bowl of ice water after steaming, pseudo-blanching them, I guess. I spread the pesto on the pizza dough, then a layer of the broccoli & bok choy mixture and topped it off with mozzarella. I followed the rest of the recipe to roll them up and bake. They were delicious!!