Beets: How I Love Thee

Indeed, I love beets. I've been wanting to pickle them for a few years but first had to find a good recipe for them (not easy) which I located in The Joy Of Cooking book "All About Canning". Is it really a good recipe? I won't know until the beets have sat around for at least a few weeks. Pickles are not good until all the flavors have had a chance to really get personal with each other in the jars. The concept of old food is interesting. People are so freaked out by germs and bacterias and yet it takes certain yeasts and bacterias to age or ferment some of our favorite foods.

Isn't it weird that most cheddar cheese is at least two years old? I find myself thinking about the age of my cheese and how it relates to my life. You could have a baby and make some cheese at the same time, and then when you're baby is a toddler and you're crying about how fast the years have passed, only then will your cheese be ready to eat. That's some OLD dairy. Yet the idea of drinking sour milk freaks the living sh*$ out of us all. What the heck do we think "sour" cream is anyway, angel farts?

It must be admitted though that when foods are purposely fermented or aged we're applying some muscle to the right kinds of micro-organisms. We aren't courting just any old yeasties. We are pretty specific about the ones we like, with good reason. There are some pretty dangerous ones out there.

You know how we always hear about how Native Americans respect animals more and show that respect by not wasting even a tiny bit of the animals they kill? They use every scrap. But you don't hear people saying the same thing about vegetables. I was thinking about this yesterday and enjoying the fact that in pickling my beets I was making use of all of their parts. Now that I have developed an appreciation for the beet greens I washed them all and saved all the good greens. I blanched them and put them in the fridge for a meal later this week.

There are two possibilities for the stems and trimmed bits: 1) the compost pile. Obviously you have a compost pile. Right? (Well, I can't be all superior here because I didn't have one until just this year. But seriously, you should start one if you don't already have one.) or 2) chicken scraps. My girls LOVE kitchen scraps. They do have preferences though and I know they don't care for carrots. They love greens and beets as far as I can tell. So these scraps go into the production of fresh eggs. That is so cool, I'm totally geeking out over it!

So am I as spiritual and cool as a Native American for not wasting any part of the vegetables I harvest? I know I'm not as good looking as a Native American. But clearly I have deep respect for nature.

I was supposed to ripple cut my beets. I don't have a ripple cutter though. So I sliced them in the Cuisinart. They are a little thin and the rounds were too big so I had to cut them in half while carefully giving myself second degree burns. They aren't going to look quite as pretty as I would like. If I get a chance to do another batch I think I'll borrow Lisa E.'s crinkle cutter or I'll julienne them. Either way would make a prettier presentation. Does it matter?

HELL YEAH!


In the interests of giving others the courage to start canning some of their own jam or other foods, I am going to list here the most important tips I can think of for canning:

• Always put your canning pot on to boil before you start anything else. It can take over an hour to get it to a rolling boil. Sometimes longer depending on the size of the pot and the strength of your stove.

• The most important thing to know before canning is this: preserving food can never make bad food better. Never use old, bruised, or rotting foods to preserve. Preserving doesn't stop deterioration, it merely slows it. So you should always start with the best produce possible- you want it ripe for best nutrition and flavor, but not over ripe or the flavor and nutrition will be inferior as will be the texture.

• Everything that you use for canning should be clean first. However, if anyone ever tells you to use bleach or disinfectant to sterilize your kitchen they are freaked out and giving very unsafe advice. It is unnecessary to sterilize your kitchen with chemicals. Hot water and soap will do.

• Before eating any home canned goods check to see if the seal is still strong. If you can't pry the lid off with your fingernail it's good. It should be slightly concave, if it makes a popping sound and gives a little to pressure the seal is no good. There shouldn't be a primordial ooze leaking out. Smell it: if it smells foul, it probably is. Unless it's kimchi and you hate kimchi. Because if it's something you hate it's going to seem foul to you whether it is or not. If there's mold or bad smells, dump it out. The only other indication that the food has gone bad is if the texture is slimy. But you would notice these things in commercially canned goods too, right? It's really no different. Except that with home canned goods you can be sure there are no bug parts or rat parts in it. You can't be so sure about commercially canned foods. Once you start thinking about that you may never want to eat commercially canned foods again.
  

• Follow the directions. If you follow the directions you will be successful. If you aren't sure of the directions you can call your local extension office and they will probably have someone who can answer your questions. Or you can call a friend who's experienced which is even better. Best of all is to find a friend to teach you. You can always e-mail me with questions and if it's something I don't know the answer to I can most likely find the answer somewhere else.
  

• Start with jam. You can't go wrong with jam. It's the easiest and safest thing to can. It's high in acid so the risk of botulism is nonexistent if you follow the instructions and properly process it. Most people like jam. Jam is good. Jam is delicious. Right now it's berry season so get your buns out there and pick some berries!!