Beet Ever So Humble

I love root vegetables. Especially as the base for one of my favorite dishes in our soul food kitchen: roasted whole chicken. It’s a simple dish, sort of. You take whatever seasonal root vegetables you have around — right now in Tel Aviv that would be fennel, potatoes, yams, carrots, turnips, jerusalem artichokes, and, yes, beets — dollop them in olive oil and sea salt, and then lay them in a pan on top of which you have a whole chicken that has been sitting in brine for a day, also painted with olive oil and sea salt. But this is not a recipe blog here, right, so I’ll leave you to your own devices.

No, what I want to talk about is beets, which loathed as a kid with every fiber of its being. The beets I had as a kid were always served during Jewish Holidays, always came out of a glass jar, always were pickled. Why would you do that to a kid? I mean, why? And try to pass it off as some kind of delicacy from the Old Country? Really? It took me decades to bite into a beet once I left home. Oh my fucking god. Roasted beets. We do them in a salad. Serve it as a soup. Use it as the star attraction in our beet and labane dip. Showcase it in the roasted whole chicken dish. OK, maybe I’m over-compensating for giving the beet the short shrift decades ago.

But that’s just it, no? Using the second half of our life to re-do the first half? I’d like to say that a quote by Goethe comes to mind, but I actually had to google it:. It’s still pretty good: “By seeking and blundering we learn.” I need to put that up somewhere in my kitchen (if I had any room).