quinn's place

colour on toast!

these toasts are extreeeemely flavorful, hearty, and tasty. i made a higher-maintenance version of it last summer with a layer of sauteed mushrooms and yellow onion below the beet layer. even though that was pretty damn good too, it was a lot of things piled onto one piece of toast.

so i went a little bit simpler with it this time.

the color of beets is just insane! so pretty! i'm constantly boggled by all the wild colors and textures and flavors that grow naturally in the ground. like, whoaaa.

sooo,

can you paint with all the colors of the wind

toasts with goat cheese!

toasts with goat cheese and spinach!

toasts with goat cheese, spinach, and beets!

toasts with goat cheese, spinach, beets, and pickled red onion!

toasts with goat cheese, spinach, beets, pickled red onion, walnuts, more goat cheese, and balsamic glaaaaaaaaze!

that doesn't quite have as much of a ring to it as that sesame street song about a

frog on a bump on a log in a hole in the bottom of the sea

layered toast song in progress.

this one goes out to the last day of summer 2015.

it was a fun & delicious summer indeed!

Roasted Beet, Spinach, & Goat Cheese Toasts with Balsamic Glaze

Ingredients:

1 roasted red beet, cooled
1 roasted golden beet, cooled
small fresh loaf of bread // seedy or wheaty!
fresh spinach leaves
goat cheese
pickled red onion
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
balsamic glaze

Instructions-

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Cut off any stalks or greens from the beets and rinse any dirt off. Wrap the beets separately in foil, place in a baking pan, and into the oven. Roast them for about 45 minutes to an hour, or until you can feel them become slightly soft. You can do this step days ahead of time before making these toasts. The beets are usually cold on the toast anyway, so no need to worry about keeping them hot.

Once the beets have come out of the oven and cooled for about half an hour, slice them into 1/8 inch rounds. Slice your bread into almost 1 inch wide slices (they've got to be hefty enough to carry a good amount of weight). Toast the bread.

Spread goat cheese on well-toasted slices of bread. Layer on fresh leaves of spinach. Add a layer of sliced red and golden beets. Top with a few pickled red onions, chopped walnuts, and extra goat cheese crumbles. Drizzle with balsamic glaze.

ENJOY!

pete and i headed out to the alpine lakes wilderness off highway 2 over labor day weekend for a backpacking trek. we hiked in about 6 miles with 3,000 feet of elevation gain. i've never hiked up that high with a gigantic backpack on, so it was a challenge for me.

we saw so many beautiful views. and it was our first glimpse of the year into the classic pacific northwest fall weather and changing leaves, so it was worth it.

we passed a few lakes on our hike up. its so crazy to just be hiking up a mountain and come upon a giant lake. but there are so many of them out there!

almost to our spot! my body was physically rejecting the idea of going any further, haha. hiking with a huge pack on is no joke!

this is pete's "hurry it up" expression. somehow he is like made of steel and has some insane endurance.

little heart lake!

our camp site we chose was very pretty and right on the lake. there were only a couple other people up there. i was glad there was at least somebody else around...we were pretty deep in da wild. at one point, i was so beyond exhausted that i mentally accepted the fact that if a bear started chasing me, i'd for sure be dead meat. i don't think my knees and ankles could physically run away from it even at a hobbling pace.

when we slept, we were both SURE there were bears roaming around our tent. but who knows. we were both just scaring each other. this damn chipmunk kept scuttling around right next to me outside the tent and making me think a bear was on its way. it also poured rain the entire night. there was a pile of slush outside our tent when we woke up, and snow had fallen up on the higher mountains that we could see from our campsite. we stayed surprisingly dry, though! i brought just enough layers.

soo, it was cooooold. its one of those situations where we really wanted to be sitting in our little fold-out chairs by the water and drinking our fancy boxed wine, but we were so cold we just went and and sat in our sleeping bags in the tent and cooked our food and played cards. we ate a whole bunch o astronaut food aka backpacking food. those dehydrated meals are pretty dang good, i say! we decided our fave that we brought was the cilantro lime rice burrito bowl. then we decided that we should bring tortillas to wrap the astronaut food in, and it would all be soo much more satisfying. lots of the meals would work well inside of a tortilla. like the breakfast egg, potato, & veggie scramble. wilderness breakfast burritos!

look how foggy the next day, oooooh:

making the trek back down // dreaming of cheeseburgers. our classic post-hike tradition. we usually talk about cheeseburgers the whole way down, haha.