Category Archives: Salads and Sides

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Simply Black Beans

The recipes that will make it on this blog are ones mostly created by my personal chef.  He rarely “cheats”.  I cheat all the time.  And honestly, neither one of us call using canned anything cheating.  But hey, technically I cheated.  I was throwing together a meal after the end of a long work day.  L-O-N-G!  It was an Old El Paso tacos kind of night.  TexMex all the way.  We are proud to say that we love taco shell tacos – the kind made with taco seasoning in a packet.  But, what can you serve with them?

I sauntered out to the garden and grabbed a couple serrano peppers and a handful of chives.  And voila!  Simply Black Beans!  If you don’t have a garden, then just add WHATEVER pepper that is hanging out in your fridge (but do blister it) and throw in some chopped up onions (that you have sautéed a tad).

Read on for the recipe (and some great pictures of blistering peppers). 

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Easy Beet Salad

The first time I ate a beet was 24 hours after I gave birth to my son Ryan by C-Section. It was my first meal. Beets were on the plate. Canned beets. And they were sooooooo good. About two weeks later I bought a can of sliced beets. And they were soooooo gross. I guess I was hungry that day in the hospital.

Fast forward to an evening in Vail, Colorado where my brother, my personal chef and my mother and I were on a get-away. My brother treated us to a fancy dinner and we ordered a roasted beet salad. “It tastes like the earth,” my brother remarked. This was a compliment of course because that salad was sooooooo good.

So I started to grow beets. And now I will never NOT grow them. Never ever.  Keep reading for an easy recipe below.