Beet Juice and (almost) Tapenade

Friday night. Plan was to make the tapenade, croutons, and beet juice. I did not manage to do any of these successfully.

First, the beet juice: I ran down to my mother in law's house to juice the beets.


(I love how pretty peeled beets are, with the swirly pattern)

She is impatient and insisted I must be doing something wrong or that the beets should be cooked because it was taking FOR-E-VER to juice them. She microwaved them. They juiced quickly, but only gave me half of the juice I needed. Oh, well, I figured I'd just reduce that slightly less and not add quite as much butter to the glaze the next day.

Second, the tapenade: I went to take out the special nicoise olives I had actually found at Whole Foods (LOVE the olive bar!) But… they were no where to be seen. I realized that, after my disastrous toddler-trip on Wednesday, that I didn't really recall seeing them when I put the groceries away. Whole Foods was closing in 10 minutes and takes 15 minutes to get to. So, I guess the tapenade would wait. (in hindsight, I'm glad this happened – because I may have uninvited Friday night then if I had discovered how much I hate deboning anchovies).

After this, I lost all motivation to do anything, so I crashed in front of the tv with Brandon. He got up to get a drink, so I asked him to swirl the reducing beets. Which, by the way, have NO "suggested" time for how long it should take to reduce them. I then promptly forgot about them for another hour, ran over to check on them, and found… a small pile of sludge-like beet "glaze." Whoops.

Resources: well, I think we all know this is a big fail... no salt-packed anchovies to be found, and left Nicoise olives at Whole Foods!