Beets Taste Like Dirt

There are many foods from my childhood that I swore I hated and would never eat after my mother no longer had control of my meal plans. Mom served the items from a can: mushrooms, asparagus, peas, corn, green beans and BEETS!

I have come to love all the above mentioned foods after discovering the fresh varieties, including BEETS! Well, maybe love is a strong word for the beets but I can eat one now as long as it’s fresh from the garden and roasted. Notice I said one.

For years, my friends and various exes tried to convince me that beets were good. I always said “Beets taste like dirt, won’t eat ‘em!” I was told “Well you just haven’t had it prepared correctly.” So they would order lovely (to look at) roasted beet salads with goat cheese and make me take a bite. Blech, tasted like dirt with goat cheese on it. But I always kept trying.

My mother would say “Just take a bite, you might like it.” That has worked with mushrooms and asparagus when I had it fresh but well, beets, blech. Then I started learning how to vegetable garden. My garden buddy said “Let’s plant beets!” I said “Beets taste like dirt. You can have ‘em.”

 




Well, my husband at the time loved beets. So I brought a few home and roasted them for him. I did take a bite and well let’s just say I didn’t spit it out. Hmm, that wasn’t horrible or too dirt like. Eventually, after a few years of growing beets, I got to the point I could eat half of a small roasted beet. I even would order roasted beet salad with goat cheese when out with the girls. I would eat a couple of bites of the beets and give them to the others, then eat my red stained goat cheese and lettuce.

I have graduated to eating one medium size roasted beet if it’s fresh from the garden. My wonderful boyfriend and I grow beets and he loves them. I also have discovered a great recipe for beet hummus. It’s pretty good and a crazy magenta color.

I also have dried beet slices, which I then pulverized in my spice grinder. The point of this was to see if I could substitute beet powder for red food coloring in the marinade for tandoori chicken. When one goes to an Indian restaurant (or at least the one I like in my town) it is a toasty red color. The tandoori doesn’t taste any different if you don’t use the food coloring, it’s just more colorful.

So I added a couple of tablespoons of beet powder to the marinade and it turned magenta, not really red. Which makes sense because as you can see the beets aren’t really red red. And then when I cooked the chicken most of the color just cooked away. Maybe I will try orange beets next year and see if that makes a difference.