It was a surprise that three things I cooked today and yesterday turned out pretty well, since I don’t really know how to cook — yesterday I made Gold Coast stew, which like lots of things tastes better after a night in the refrigerator. I don’t like to deal with raw meat much, so I buy boned, skinned chicken “tenders” (strips) and boil them. Then rip them into pieces and add them to a big frying pan with a couple of chopped & sauteed onions, a tiny can of tomato paste, 2 cups of water + 2 chicken bouillon cubes (or chicken stock), and about a quarter-cup of peanut butter. Or maybe not so much peanut butter, I didn’t measure, just thew in a couple of rounded tablespoonfuls and stirred it in to melt into the tomato mixture.

Today I’d planned to make green beans sauteed in garlic and sea salt and olive oil, which I love…. but the green beans were going bad, even though it seems like they shouldn’t have had time to. So there were some absolutely giant beets to cook instead.

These were organically grown monsters, sold with huge fluffy tops. After being sad about wasting the green beans I wondered if I could cook the beet tops; I found some tips online. They tell you to cut the stems off each leaf frond to sautee first, since they take longer than the leafy part. I chopped up the leaves. I threw the stems in a frying pan with some olive oil & sea salt and a large chopped onion, and cooked that for a few minutes, then put in the leaves. These leaves were thick and tough, but finally melted and cooked down some.

I thought the beet leaves were so large that they’d be bitter but they weren’t at all; the onion really makes them right. The combination tasted a little like pine nuts, which I would add next time, and maybe a chopped potato too.

The third thing was the beets, which were difficult to deal with since I microwaved them and I’m not good at peeling the skins off things like that. Yams are hard too… These beets were terrifically dark and bled all over when I tried to skin them, so my kitchen looked like a murder scene after a while. But it must be a great time for beets, because these were very, very sweet when cooked.