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kniteracy[Harper's Kitchen] Today's Special: Mangel-Wurzel
But first, a reading from the book of Tom Robbins, Volume Four, Jitterbug Perfume.
Organic Vegetable Boxes
For the last couple of weeks, I've had my Tesco grocery delivery include an organic vegetable box. I guess I first heard about these on LiveJournal, and when I saw that Tesco would deliver one, full of veggies both common and exotic, to my door for not very much money, I added one to the last weekly shopping order. It was so much fun to sift through the variety of vegetables inside the box and plan the week's menus around those vegetables. It was like a game, and the best part about it was that we had totally fresh vegetables for a whole week, and it was great.. The first box contained bitter lettuce, potatoes, onions, carrots, pears, apples, celery, fennel and beets. We liked it so much we have gotten another one for this week.
Now, I have always loved pickled beets, which is the most common way they're sold and served in the US where I grew up. I recall going to an Italian restaurant called Provino's with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caomhan when we were in college and actually having to negotiate over the beets in our shared salad. Beets, however, are not normally seen in US grocery stores, at least not where I used to live.
The organic veggie box packing list said you could roast beets with meats just as you might roast potatoes, so I decided to try that with the chicken breast I was roasting one evening. However, just before I got everything ready to go into the oven, I got a confirmation fromaunty_marion that she'd be coming over for dinner. Plans had to change: AM dislikes beets intensely. So I swapped them out of the roasting pan and into the refrigerator, to be dealt with another time.
The Saturday Afternoon Grocery Order
By the end of the week, we'd used up nearly all our organic veggies, except for half a bunch of celery (which is no longer crisp but might do in a chicken soup) and the beets. So as I was making the grocery order yesterday, I decided that I needed to justify that money by making sure I cooked the beets last night, since we were expecting another bunch of beets in the next grocery order.
When the cook's education is lacking....
...the cook hies herself onto the World Wide Web and does the obvious Google Search: How to cook beets. As always, four billion links popped up, and I checked out several. I learned, among other things that there is such a thing as beet cake, which I may or may not look into making at some point, and I found about fifty recipes for borscht alone. I haste to add that I have never actually had borscht, so I am leaning toward the recipe in this blog entry from David Seah, called Better Living Through Borscht, since he'd never had borscht either when he first made the stuff.
But back to last night's adventure. Because I'm a simple soul, after I read several recipes and how-tos, I chose How to cook beets from ehow.com as the base recipe, since it looked simple and I like beets in general so didn't expect to need to cover up the taste with anything else. Cooking beets this way, just baking/roasting them in the oven, is easy peasy and doesn't take all that long. You just wash and clean the beets, sip off tops and tails (you can reserve the tops to have later with other veggies, they say), stick the in a pan with some water for steam, cover the pain with foil, and roast at 450°F or Gas Mark 8 (converstion information from OnlineConversion.com until they're easily pierced with a knife, between 30-45 minutes. Our beets took 35 minutes. When the beets are done, take the skins off under running water. This is incredibly easy: I used a knife to slice off the tops and bottoms, and under cool running water, the skins just slid away-- and the beets were still steaming hot on the inside!
I served them up with chicken breasts panfried in butter and garlic, a good frozen Mediterranean vegetable selection, and Thai jasmine rice. I think it all turned out pretty well.
But first, a reading from the book of Tom Robbins, Volume Four, Jitterbug Perfume.
Today's Special
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish admittedly ,is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the ark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon tot he Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is a mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t----.
Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy; commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole--and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)
An old Ukranian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."
That is a risk we have to take.
Jitterbug perfume, Tom Robbins, 1984
Organic Vegetable Boxes
For the last couple of weeks, I've had my Tesco grocery delivery include an organic vegetable box. I guess I first heard about these on LiveJournal, and when I saw that Tesco would deliver one, full of veggies both common and exotic, to my door for not very much money, I added one to the last weekly shopping order. It was so much fun to sift through the variety of vegetables inside the box and plan the week's menus around those vegetables. It was like a game, and the best part about it was that we had totally fresh vegetables for a whole week, and it was great.. The first box contained bitter lettuce, potatoes, onions, carrots, pears, apples, celery, fennel and beets. We liked it so much we have gotten another one for this week.
Now, I have always loved pickled beets, which is the most common way they're sold and served in the US where I grew up. I recall going to an Italian restaurant called Provino's with
caomhan when we were in college and actually having to negotiate over the beets in our shared salad. Beets, however, are not normally seen in US grocery stores, at least not where I used to live. The organic veggie box packing list said you could roast beets with meats just as you might roast potatoes, so I decided to try that with the chicken breast I was roasting one evening. However, just before I got everything ready to go into the oven, I got a confirmation from
aunty_marion that she'd be coming over for dinner. Plans had to change: AM dislikes beets intensely. So I swapped them out of the roasting pan and into the refrigerator, to be dealt with another time.The Saturday Afternoon Grocery Order
By the end of the week, we'd used up nearly all our organic veggies, except for half a bunch of celery (which is no longer crisp but might do in a chicken soup) and the beets. So as I was making the grocery order yesterday, I decided that I needed to justify that money by making sure I cooked the beets last night, since we were expecting another bunch of beets in the next grocery order.
When the cook's education is lacking....
...the cook hies herself onto the World Wide Web and does the obvious Google Search: How to cook beets. As always, four billion links popped up, and I checked out several. I learned, among other things that there is such a thing as beet cake, which I may or may not look into making at some point, and I found about fifty recipes for borscht alone. I haste to add that I have never actually had borscht, so I am leaning toward the recipe in this blog entry from David Seah, called Better Living Through Borscht, since he'd never had borscht either when he first made the stuff.
But back to last night's adventure. Because I'm a simple soul, after I read several recipes and how-tos, I chose How to cook beets from ehow.com as the base recipe, since it looked simple and I like beets in general so didn't expect to need to cover up the taste with anything else. Cooking beets this way, just baking/roasting them in the oven, is easy peasy and doesn't take all that long. You just wash and clean the beets, sip off tops and tails (you can reserve the tops to have later with other veggies, they say), stick the in a pan with some water for steam, cover the pain with foil, and roast at 450°F or Gas Mark 8 (converstion information from OnlineConversion.com until they're easily pierced with a knife, between 30-45 minutes. Our beets took 35 minutes. When the beets are done, take the skins off under running water. This is incredibly easy: I used a knife to slice off the tops and bottoms, and under cool running water, the skins just slid away-- and the beets were still steaming hot on the inside!
I served them up with chicken breasts panfried in butter and garlic, a good frozen Mediterranean vegetable selection, and Thai jasmine rice. I think it all turned out pretty well.
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Date: 2006-10-15 05:02 pm (UTC)There is a body of old folk belief that claims the beet was an intermediate stage in the life cycle of insects: the bees shedding their wings, hibernating as beets, then emerging in the spring as beetles. The sequence of Bee, Beet and Beetle is still a staple, often emerging from the undergrowth of old English wordplay and a real return to the roots of our culture.