Pizza with Beet Greens, Potato and Sausage

A savory and satisfying pizza with a roasted garlic oil base topped with sautéed beet greens, potatoes and sausage.

When life rattles you, go back to basics to find your groove.

My groove is Friday night pizza night. My family likes to eat pizza and watch movies in the basement on Friday nights, and I like to use the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share to feed us.

You could say it's a winning combination.

Making pizzas using farm share ingredients is a technique I've developed over time, 10 farm share seasons to be precise. I've shared homemade pizza how to do so in My Pizza Primer and Seven Tips for Making Pizzas at Home posts. Not all pizzas have been winners so they don't appear on this blog, but for the most part adding some farm fresh vegetables to a pizza greatly enhances the flavor and decreases the remaining amount of veggies in the fridge.

My fridge--no, I want to talk about my freezers. I've defrosted and reorganized all freezer space in the past day, all because my neighbor called and said she was half an hour out with half a cow, and did we want any? Thanks to a friend who offered empty freezer in her garage for the 'ack I don't know what to do with all this there's no room'--i.e., the heart, tongue(s) and liver--I managed to fit everything in while still saving room in the fruit and vegetable freezer for putting up summer produce. I'm not back in that groove yet though--there are banana peppers to be pickled, and they can just keep hanging out on the plant because I am not yet ready!

For other recipes using beet greens, please see my Beet Recipes Collection. For other recipes using potatoes, please see my Potato Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For other pizza ideas, and I've got a whole mess of them, please see the Visual Pizza Recipe Index, or my Friday Night Pizza Night Pinterest board.

Breakfast Salad

Roasted potatoes, sautéed cabbage and shallots, and puffy scrambled eggs combined for a tasty morning--or evening--meal in one. A tasty way to start off your day--with vegetables.

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I'll be among the first to admit that my family is weird about breakfasts.  The kids don't like cereal (except for when they love cereal, geez, Mom, why didn't you buy more?), my spouse would happily eat oatmeal every single day, and I'm not hungry for hours after I wake up.  I'm very glad my kids are happy to eat leftovers and my spouse is self sufficient.  We do like muffins, eggs, and waffles a lot around here, though, and like to have big family breakfasts on the weekends. You'll find many breakfast or muffin options in my recipe index by category to your right --->

This is not a fast meal, and would be terrific for a weekend breakfast, or lunch or even Breakfast for Dinner if you like. For us it's another way to eat more veggies, and an unusual name that just stuck with me.  I mean, the idea of cabbage and potatoes together is a classic one.  And in our house, cabbage and potatoes for breakfast is not too unusual when we're getting cabbage in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share.

But to throw it all in a bowl and call it a salad is different for me. I got the idea on a walk [I walked a half marathon last year and recently signed up to do it again--hopefully with my spouse this time] while mulling over what to do with a cabbage.  I'd been seeing salad recipe round ups, and it just hit me that fixing our cabbage-for-breakfast, with a few modifications, would equal a Breakfast Salad.

Roasted Shrimp and Potato Salad with Grapes and Celery

A savory and sweet, crunchy and filling late summer salad with roasted potatoes and shrimp, chopped celery, and whole grapes in a dilled yogurt-mayonnaise-lemon dressing.

I've been doing a lot of walking to train for a half marathon, and part of my walking has been to pick up milk at the local grocery store.  Normally I have Simon (the photobombing dog below) with me, waiting patiently at the dog tie up & water station, so I don't linger in the aisles.  The other morning, however, my daughter and I walked together, and after walking in the woods (just found out there's elevation changes on the course, so I need to get some hills in) she and Simon headed home and I headed to the store for milk (and to pad my mileage).  I had time to linger over the deli section, and two salads in particular caught my eye--a dilled shrimp, celery, and grape salad and a dilled lemon potato salad.

On the way home (lugging a gallon of milk is not the hassle it used to be--a side benefit of having kids who go through a gallon every 36 hours) I wondered what would happen if I combined the two salads and, for grins and giggles, roasted the potatoes and shrimp instead of boiling or steaming them.

Since the celery I'm regrowing in my garden is doing amazingly well (of course it is, since I'm only meh on celery by itself, though I love it in soup packs and to help stretch a pound of ground meat) I figured I'd try and combine the recipes.  Our farmers have a nifty new tool, a potato digger, and we've been getting lovely harvests of red potatoes lately, so I had most everything I needed.  I played around with my kitchen scale again, like I did in my Chicken Salad by the Ounce recipe, but this time in metric form.  The volumes in this recipe are my estimation of the weights I used.