Beet Rolls, Taste of Summer!

Making this recipe always makes me think of life on the farm and the huge garden Mom used to put in yearly.  I had posted a picture of my Mom's huge garden on Instagram and how everything was canned before she had a freezer.  

She froze bags of peas, beans and corn, but still liked to can whole tomatoes and chili sauce which would be very similar to today's Salsa.  The variety of pickles done was amazing from dill pickles, different relishes, bread and butter pickle, mustard beans and ice pickles.  It seems unbelievable that all this was done in a very short time for the winter months.  The remarks were interesting as many wondered why such a big garden.  The harvest from this garden was used all winter.  There was no superstore in those days!

We are now so depended on stores to supply our food source, that my grandchildren as many others are not familiar with the taste of fresh vegetable from a garden.   How many of us have just gone into a garden and eaten pea from the vine, carrots that are wiped on our pants than eaten!  Planting a garden and preserving, canning, pickling the vegetables is a dying art. 

Picking Raspberries in Grandmother's Garden

I always thought this simple recipe was something my mom invented because of abundance of beet leaves and cream from her milking cows.  This recipe seems to be most popular in the prairies. The leaves are also used to make a cabbage roll type holopchi  which certainly would take less time preparing the leaves than preparing cabbage leaves. 

Check out the row of corn, Not sure what the next two rows are, then onion, beets, cucumbers, somewhere would be peas, beans, potatoes, carrots.   

I have blogged on Beet Rolls before.  In this recipe, I am trying to have a complete casserole done in one step, rather than in two steps! 

The dough I used for the beet rolls was my Refrigerator Bread dough which is always so handy to have on hand. 

The leaves had been washed and dried in a lettuce spinner and kept fresh with the stems in water.

A small piece of dough is rolled in the beet leave and placed into a greased baking dish.

Usually I baked the beet rolls until the dough is baked and then make a cream sauce using chopped onions and fresh dill, adding the cooked beet rolls to the sauce and heat until the buns have absorbed the sauce.. In fact the three trays pictured above have been frozen for later use. The only problem is that I don't regular buy heavy cream. 

This was a trail run to see it adding the cream sauce to the rolls and baking the bun longer would have the same result.

The Beet Rolls were baked for 20 minutes at 350 degrees, then chopped shallots and fresh garden dill was added to the buns,   

One cup of heavy cream was also added to the buns

The buns were baked for 10 minutes longer but since the top of the buns had not absorbed the cream, I pressed down the buns with a spatula so that they would also absorb the cream.  The buns were further baked 10 to 15 minutes.

The buns did take longer to cook but did look like buns that had been simmer in cream on the stove top. 

Having had more beet leaves, I did two casseroles that I froze as a complete dish for Thanksgiving!

Certainly the presentation in casserole dish is much more visual and appealing than in a serving bowl! 

These two casseroles were cooled and frozen