Ever since I went to the tomato restaurant in Tokyo, I have been thinking about making tomato jam when the right season returned. Now the tomato season is here and the local farmer's market was selling a box of tomatoes for $12. I canned and freezed most of the fresh tomatoes for the winter but I saved some to make some salsa and jam.

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The challenge : Photo inspired food

This Sunday Challenge, I was given the assignment to come up with a meal inspired by a photo. Here is the photo that my husband chose.

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The challenge : Photo inspired food

After thinking about this for a while, I decided that one way to ease the flavor of beets was to infuse some other flavor into the beets. And the way I came up with to do that is to stuff some kind of meat in the beets and braise them slowly so that the juice from meat will infuse the beets. I think any kind of ground meat would work but I used Italian sausage this time because it has such a distinctive flavor and aroma. I mixed the meat with other flavors, vegetables like shallots and garlic, and stuffed them into the prepared beets.

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Poor beets, they are so often on the top of people's "I hate ...." lists. Since beets are not very typical in Japan, my first beet experience was when I had a wonderful Borscht at a fancy Russian restaurant in Tokyo a long time ago. When I came to the U.S., I realized so many people hate beets (my husband is one of them) and I was wondering why. Then when I went to an old style cafeteria which was my grandmother in-law's favorite, I found out why. The beets were boiled down until very mushy and piled in a heated buffet bowl inside a red sea. Even I would become a beets-hater.

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