Two Easy Apps

Here are two quick appetizer ideas that I worked with for our last party...

1. Hummus served on bell peppers.

I used both plain and sun dried tomato hummus, and piped them onto chopped pepper pieces.

Great for presentation and made my buffet line move quickly since people could just grab and go.

2. Beeting Heart Skewers

This was nice because it was easy to make and I love using beets for the color they give.

Ingredients:
8 oz fresh goat cheese, at room temperature
2 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary
1/4 tsp freshly cracked pepper
8 oz baby beets, peeled and steamed, divided into 36 pieces
14 oz whole hearts of palm
36, 4" skewers

Directions:
1. Mix together the cheese, rosemary, and pepper.  Roll into 36 balls, approximately 3/4" big
2. Place goat cheese, beet piece, and heart of palm on each skewer
3. Arrange/serve as desired.

Home Grown Beet Salad

Heading out to jazz in the park, and we quickly needed to find a picnic friendly dish where we already had the ingredients.

Luckily for us, we have a bunch of beets ready for the pulling.  This is the first year I've planted beets in the garden, since I'm not, typically, a beet eater.  However, my mom loves them, and I know they're relatively easy to can, so I thought I'd give them a try.

I planted Chioggia beets, primarily because they had cool stripes in the picture.

Also, because they were available when I wanted to plant them in my garden, so it worked all around.

Sure enough, when you cut off the tops - there are some really fluorescent stripes!

Ingredients:
6 large beets
2 T chopped parsley (I used cilantro since it was in the garden)
2 1/2 T freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 T olive oil
Minced red onion, salt, and pepper to taste

I was surprised how many of the stripes remained after cooking!

Directions:
1. Boil beets until tender.  Remove from water, then remove skins when cool enough to touch.
2. Cube the cooled beets.
3. Mix with remaining ingredients.
4. Let marinate in the fridge 1 hour (up to 24 hours), before serving.

As a non-beet eater, I was really surprised how sweet and amazing these were.  Definitely will do this recipe again!