Red beets salad with caramelized pecans and dill

After travelling and extreme floods, here is finally a new blog post with a fantastic summer salad.

This red beets salad is super refreshing and a perfect way of getting all the raw vegetables and nuts you need.
It's a nice addition to all that meat at your barbecue party and can also be served as a nice and healthy appetizer or as a light lunch or dinner.

I cannot wait to use the beets from our garden for it! Still have to wait a little on those ones...

What you need:

4-5 red beets (fresh)
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
5 spring onions, chopped into fine rings
300-350 g (approx.) 1-1.5 cups of yogurt (around 3.2-3.5% fat)
150-200ml (approx 0,25-0.5 cup) heavy cream
150g pecans chopped
1 bunch of dill, roughly chopped
1 bunch of chives, roughly chopped
salt, pepper, honey/sugar
olive or carmelina oil

Directions:

Peel the red beets.
You may want to use gloves for that because of the red dye. I didn't and it washed off my hands quite easily.
With the grating attachement on a food processor (ideally) roughly grate the beets.

In a pan slowly roast the chopped pecans.
When browned, add some honey or sugar and caramelize the pecans with it.
Remove from heat and set aside to cool down.

In a pan heat up some olive/carmelina oil at medium heat.
Add the garlic and spring onions and sautée for a few minutes, until soft (do not fry them!).
Set aside and let cool down.

In a big salad bowl mix together grated red beets, yoghurt and cream.
Add dill and chive, as well as garlic, spring onions and roasted pecans.

Mix well.

Season to taste with salt and pepper and maybe a tiny bit of sugar.

The salad tastes even better a day later, after it has been sitting in the fridge for a while.

Notes:

All the measurements especially for the yogurt and cream are pretty much measured by eye.
I don't follow a recipe when doing it.
It always depends on how big the beets are. The beets should be nicely coated with the yoghurt-cream mix.
And regarding the dill and chive: Be generous! You cannot really screw anything up by adding 'too many' fresh herbs.

You could use sour cream instead of yoghurt, as well.

100% Sourdough Rye Bread

I have been working on baking sourdough rye bread for the past months and today I baked the best loaf so far.

I worked the recipe up from Michael Ruhlman's Ratio book, and used Highwood Crossing's really nice dark rye flour.
Enjoy!

275g Sourdough Starter
150g Water
250g Rye Flour
1 tsp Salt
1Tbsp Molasses
1.5 Teaspoon Brown Sugar
1 Tsp Caraway
5g Yeast

Cornmeal
1 Egg, beaten
Red River Cereal

Mix starter, water, salt, molasses brown sugar, caraway and yeast and let sit for 2 hours. Add in flour slowly until all wet, knead for 5 minutes(not easy, this dough is soft). Sit in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth and let rise for 24 hours. Knead for a few minutes, form loaf, sit on cornmeal and proof for 2.5 hours. Heat oven to 500 with water bowl and baking stone. Brush loaf with egg and coat with red river cereal. Mist oven with water before putting loaf in. Bake for 15 minutes at 450, then 30 minutes at 160.

Meet Welsummer, our first rooster.

Our chickens are growing quickly, and it's stil hard to tell which one of them is a rooster and which one will be a hen.
But some chicken's sex can already be clearly identified.

The only Welsummer chick we got, which was supposedly a hen, is now a proud rooster with a beautiful call. Well, he is still practicing. But it already sounds pretty cool.

A very proud rooster he is...

...and this is how he looked like when we got him.

There is also "friendly hen", the nicest one of them all:

And weird looking hawk-chicken:

In the end we can say, out of 20 chicken 17 made it so far, looking healthy happy and more bad-ass than ever.

Our thoughts go out to Limpie, sickish baby chick and docile white chicken... I bet they are having a great time in chicken heaven.

Spring onions, first harvest.

There you go.

They are quite fragrant and very flavorful.
Wil and I are proud spring onion parents.

And here is a photo of some prairie spring sky.

And a picture of our panting cat.

We wore her out completely.

Spring on the Prairie

Finally spring has arrived on our Little Haus On The Prairie!
Let's hope there won't be any more snow storm surprises...

While Wil is being my jet-setting artist husband and showing his work in New York, I'm enjoying 23°C, sun and blue sky on our patio with a glass of iced tea in my hand.

It's so beautiful outside, it feels like I'm on vacation.

As mentioned in my previous post, everything is growing fast, now that it is warm and sunny outside.

As for our rhubarb, Wil read that it grows quicker when you cover it up with a bucket.
It stays warmer, especially during the cold nights on the prairies, and it keeps the moisture.

We covered up half of the rhubarb, and the difference is significant!

Rhubarb to the right is non-bucket rhubarb. The one on the top left is the one we covered up. It's hard to tell in the picture, but it is definitely bigger!

Have a great start of the week, everyone!