True (CSA) Confessions

OK.

It happened.

Last night, the night before I was to go pick up our next CSA harvest, I had to throw some stuff away.

There were four or so tomatillos that I didn't use in the tomatillo salsa earlier in the week. And a SMALL bunch of tatsoi I hadn't gotten around to using in a salad or something before they got a bit skanky.

And one large-ish bunch of scarlet, beautiful beets.

In one giant, painful, Eff You to the pilgrims, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her ilk, all those who made do...lived off the land...used every scrap, not to mention the host of poor, starving Indian children my mother pled for when brother Ned refused to eat his peas - I picked them up and tossed them in the trash. Yes, the trash. So I suppose that's one more Eff to the capital U to my greener friends who will bemoan this sorry loss to their compost bins.

OK. I hate myself a little. I don't, as I've said, relish the idea of wasting food. But, hey, I maintain that I remain a bad and deeply flawed individual.

I didn't toss those beets, though.

No.

Instead of making my (very European, mind you) daily jaunt to the market to pick up something for dinner, I vowed to make dinner with what we still had in and that would be...

"beets...lots of dill (now bagged in the freezer - thank you, Deana!)..."

Borscht! Or something very like it.

I've never had it. Never made it. But I knew I could make a really nice beet soup with what we still had in and serve it with a nice side salad. Sauteed some onions, carrots (from the CSA!), garlic, celery and added the peeled chopped up beets, then covered with some water and vegetable stock and seasoning and cooked that until soft. Pureed that in the blender and returned to the pot, then seasoned it and added a shot of apple cider vinegar and some of the aforementioned dill. Finished it with the beet greens which I'd washed and sliced thinly (in lieu of, what I believe is, the more traditional cabbage).

I think it made for a tasty and highly nutritious - and pretty! - soup.

Mrs. B (not the one who searched diligently for fashion deals at the now defunct Bradlees) and I sat down and enjoyed the salad (with cuke...from the CSA!) with parmesan vinaigrette. Then we moved on to the soup. Miss Kate took one spoonful and - in a stunning and uncharacteristically blunt moment of clarity - put down her spoon, slid the bowl of steaming red broth away from her and said:

"Never make that for me again."

Well...there's a first time for everything and - while I try to find ways to prepare even allegedly hated food products in a way someone might grow to like them - there was no getting this one by Miss Kate's lifelong dislike of the beet root. She's come to like them, as she stressed, in salads - particularly the lovely golden beets - but there was no getting around the fact that this dish was the oval office in the capitol of Beet Town, USA.

Props to her for trying it though, and - truth be told - I didn't have high hopes. I liked it, in the end. Eating her bowl after mine may have been overdoing it in the See, I Love This and Beets Don't Kill Department.

Thus ends our brief affair with borscht. Unless you, beet lovers everywhere, want to come over. We're keeping fingers crossed that Parker Farms doesn't show up with a bushel or two of beets, colorful delectable earthy BEETS, this week.

Stay golden, Beety Boy.