That's Not Blood

Scrubbing with a Brillo pad removed most of the skin, and soil.

That's not blood. It is beet juice. Wear gloves. Beets are the new kale. Right after the broccoli greens. Hipsters are going to be so healthy! And broke! A small bunch of beets, meaning 3 beets, at the grocery near my house, is $3!


Peeling the beets though, that's what they are hiding. You'll have to look it up to find out that peeling beets is equivalent to peeling moon rocks. All those beautiful Pinterest recipes only show the pristine, tempting, amazing-looking dishes filled with shining, deep red, super-foods that will make you live forever! They gloss over the peeling-the-beets part.

It also released their bloody essence.

Essentially, folks recommend cooking the beets first. Have you seen that Pinterest Fail website? That's how that worked for me. The beets bled...
out. All their color and nutrition - gone. They were pale pink. My healthy dinner had boiled into anemic chunks of unrecognizable vegetable matter. It was years before I tried again, and then only because the beet seeds were marked down to 25 cents a pack.

At least I got some beets! The third year I planted them!

I just couldn't bring myself, with my quest for efficiency in all thing housework, to cook AND THEN prepare the beets additionally by slicing, dicing, canning, whatever. Let me tell you, when you make pickles, they go in raw. It's the boiling brine that cooks them, and they aren't peeled first. Even canning tomatoes seems like less work than anything you can do to eat a beet.

I'm going to try this Beet Chips recipe, since the broccoli leaf chips turned out so well. My foodie, preteen son bought himself a mandolin slicer last year. He said I could borrow it. (How pathetic am I? Borrowing cooking equipment from my kid?) I'll try to ignore that it's Gweneth Paltrow's recipe. I don't know her, but her condescension in interviews toward people who are too exhausted to cook their kids' healthy food every single night is enough. I don't want to know her. I'm two-faced enough to use her recipe though.

Tomorrow. 

Today I cleaned a couple beets. That's it for me. Chocolate for dinner.
Check back soon! I'll have more pictures!