Be(et) My Valentine

Be(et) mine.

Lucky for you, the magazines I write for were kind of less than wildly enthusiastic about this idea, and so it is mine, still, to post here. It’s so cute, they said, we’re just not sure it’s really very festive or romantic for the holiday. Also: Pretty, but maybe too strange for our readers? What are they, crazy? Nothing says I Love You like beets! For one thing, the pinkness. For another, nutrients. And the sweetness. And also, the very faint dirt flavor does not as much say it, but still. Are you just picturing poor Ben and Birdy, opening their Valentine’s Day lunchboxes to a Cupid’s buffet of pickled root vegetables, while your kids bite into their frosted pink cupcakes and heart-shaped taffy kabobs? I know. Me too. But you could use the beet idea as an excuse to get this little set of aspic cutters. I have gotten so much use out of mine, it's crazy--and we don't even eat a lot of aspic! Or actually any aspic. We mostly use them to shape Fimo clay beads. And for very tiny tea sandwiches for doll parties.

In case I forget to say more about this later, this is the whole idea: cut a pickled beet slice with a tiny aspic-cutter, then add both the cut-out hearts and the outlines to a salad.

You can also use the cut-out hearts to stamp tortillas:

If I weren't such a pain in the ass about whole-grain this and that, the hearts would show up even better! Happy Wheat Germ Valentine's Day.

 And, as Birdy discovered, the beet juice makes fantastic nail polish!

(or not)

I always have beets pickled in the fridge these days, given that winter is the season of the root vegetable farm share, aka Night of the Living Turnips. You go every other week with your yawning bag of emptiness, and the cheering signs invites you to Help Yourself! 15 Pounds! Mix and Match! Whatever You Want! Which is thrilling when it’s glass beads, say, or cocktail shrimp. And less thrilling when it’s turnips, rutabagas, broken storage carrots, grubby potatoes, and daikon that dwarfs a whale’s dildo. But so far so good, thanks in part to the book An Everlasting Meal. The thing that has most significantly changed (rather than simply confirmed) the way I live and eat is her advice to cook a lot (or all) of your veggies at once, whether or not you’re planning to use them just then. Boil, roast, or pickle all of it when you get home, then it’s ready to eat plain or add to salad or a plate of bread and cheese—or to turn into soup, pasta dishes, and casseroles. I am really doing this: pickling all the beets and radishes, braising all the turnips with butter and soy sauce, roasting cubed sweet potatoes and rutabagas, marinating shredded carrots. I am more lazy than I am determined to consume junk: if there are cooked veggies, I will eat them, because there they are. And I will cook with them, because I don’t have to confront a bag of filthy or rotting tubers along. (Try it and report back, okay?)

Baked Beets

Heat the oven to 400. Place however many scrubbed but untrimmed beets you like into a lidded casserole dish that they will fit into in a nice, snug way. Add a half an inch of water, cover, and bake until the beets feel tender when you pierce them with the tip of a sharp knife. Depending on the size of your beets, this will take anywhere from 30 minutes (very small beets) to an hour and a half (enormous storage behemoths). Let the beets cool (if you cheated them, and they could use a hair extra cooking, let them cool in their lidded casserole, where they'll continue to steam a bit), then slice off their tops and rub the skins off under cold running water. Slice or cube them.

Pickled Beets

Makes 1 1/2 quarts

Active time: 15 minutes; total time: 1 hour 30 minutes

6 medium beets, baked as above

2 cups cider vinegar

1 cup water

1 tablespoon kosher salt

1/3 cup white sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon pickling spice (or a bit of allspice, cloves, bay leaf, and cinnamon)

Trim and skin the cooled beets, then slice them a quarter inch thick and put them in a large glass jar or bowl. Bring the remaining ingredients to a boil in a pot, simmer for 10 minutes, and pour through a strainer (if you used powdered spice you can skip the strainer) over the beets. Cool and store in the fridge.

Bonus Recipe: Delicious Creamy Beets

To some amount of sliced or cubed pickled beets, add a big bloop of sour cream and a large spoonful of prepared horseradish. Stir well and taste for salt and overall excitement: if it needs more oomph, a little Coleman’s mustard seems to marry well with the other flavors.

To recap: roast them.

Peel them.

Slice them.

Pickle them.

Cut them with a wee cutter.