Overwhelmed

Ugh.  Do any of you ever feel so overwhelmed with "stuff" you have to do that you instead do nothing?  Today I realized I have so much to do this week:  nanny (more than usual), bake more treats for the desk at work since no one told me my last batch of stuff had sold out, make a huge batch of assorted cookies for a 30-person event THIS Saturday, make a birthday something for my friend at work and do more preparation for my raw foods workshop (okay this is very vague and the workshop is in March so this takes lowest priority).  

So instead of doing ANY of that, what do I do?  I work on my blog.  Yup.  And spend an hour and a half making and eating dinner...and then another 20 minutes cleaning up the kitchen.  The subject of dinner, though, is one to which I'll dedicate a bit of this post.

In my constant scouring of the internet for recipes and food ideas, I have come across, on several occasions, recipes for a "Hasselback" potato.  Umm...okaaaayyyyyy.  It looks like a baked potato with slits in it, stuffed with "stuff."  And it was only tonight that I realized Hasselback was not Hasselhoff, as in David...not that that would have made any more sense but that's where my brain was.

Anyway, I still do not know exactly what a Hasselback potato is but tonight I decided to try it with a beet!  I have an unhealthy obsession with beets and probably eat about four of them a week (at least).  I roasted my beet whole, sliced it open (it kind of split in half because I cut one of the slits too deep) and filled the slices with my raw cashew-macadamia nut cheeze and then sprinkled roasted fennel, pomegranate seeds, toasted pine nuts and fresh parsley on and around the Hasselback beet.  I finished it off by cracking some black pepper over the whole thing.

It was good but next time I will do some things differently.  The first thing I will do differently is omit the fennel.  I thought I was obsessed with fennel because of my dinner the other night but in tonight's dinner, with so many strong flavors going on, I could barely discern it AND it took too long to chew.

Another thing I will do differently is use a smaller beet.  This one took WAY too long to eat.  Even I lost interest after about 40 minutes into dinner.  Now, a normal person could just stop eating but I am not normal and do not know how to do that.  I have CPS, or, as it is more commonly known, Clean Plate Syndrome.  I also hate wasting food and I knew that this would not be a dish I would reheat so I had to eat it all tonight (had to, mind you).

The last two things I will do differently are add more pomegranate seeds and a sauce of some kind to give the dish more moisture/another layer of texture.

Overall, though, I liked this dish a lot.  The beet and pomegranate seeds were awesome together and the tanginess of the cheeze served as a perfect compliment.  I liked what the pine nuts brought to the dish too and the parsley definitely enhanced the flavors.

Okay, well I really think I need to end this post and go do...something.  Waaaah.  Oh wait!  I need to upload my dinner picture THEN I will go do "something."

...or I'm going to Google "Hasselback" and figure out what this term refers to.