Beets, Beets, Beets

I have always eaten beets from a can, and I like them. They turn my fingers pink, and taste sweet and earthy. Not to mention eating something straight out of the can is so easy and convenient. Except, I always feel so guilty for eating any food that comes in a package. It is sooooooooooooo wasteful.

So I bought beets at the farmers' market in part because my boyfriend who lives far away got some in a produce basket he receives weekly, and he hated them. I am determined to find a way to perfect the eating of beets so that he will love them. (He lives far away, so I was not a part of his initial experimentation with beets.) I also bought some carrots. It was a weekend for purchasing roots, I guess. I will probably cook up the beet leaves the same way I do Swiss chard. I'm not sure how I will cook the actual beets.

One plan is to shred a beet with some carrots to eat over salad.

I also plan to roast some beets with cumin, lime, and mint--as recommended by a recipe card I received from the farmers' market. I may post the recipe and more detail on how this adventure goes when I do it.

Finally, I am contemplating a good mole-fashioned deeper'n'ever-turinip'n'tater'n'beet-root pie. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you clearly never read Brian Jacques Redwall series as a child. I have made this long-monikered pie out of the Redwall Cookbook (the stories were originally written for blind children, so they feature a lot of food talk to engage alternate senses), but it didn't include beets in it. The beets were served on the side. I wonder if that's because of a conflict of flavors or an issue with color.

Regardless, once I have roasted a few beets and get a sense of how I can blend them with seasonings, I will probably tackle developing my own deeper'n'ever-turinip'n'tater'n'beet-root pie. The cookbook's version is pretty bland and required a lot of salt and pepper. Its carrot layer was definitely the best part, but there are no carrots in the name. I can't remember if they were in the description. I may or may not include carrots in my version. We shall see.

You should eat beets, too. I will argue that they are good for you because beet juice and beets were included in a colon cleanse I did with my mom a few years ago, though my friend Molly warns that eating raw beets in large quantities can be dangerous because it is a blood cleanser. She also overshared that your pee can turn pink. That's never happened to me as a result of eating canned beets, but I suppose my adventures in farmers' market beets my have a different result.

Olive Oil and Salt Dessert

So I have another vice.

While driving home from Omaha, I was listening to The Splendid Table, and a guest recommended putting sea salt on desserts. One particular image she conjured up was of a chocolate torte with sea salt sprinkled over it. Yum!

She even recommended using olive oil in chocolate cake and drizzling it on vanilla ice cream. (I wasn't so sure about olive oil on ice cream.)

So what did I do?

I made homemade vanilla bean ice cream. Then I made a chocolate cake with olive oil. Then I put them together, drizzled more olive oil over the top, sprinkled it with sea salt, and ate.

End result?

Well...I better start working out more. It was fabulous!