“The beet is the most intense
of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the
radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are
lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity.
Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their
physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from
radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy
vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a
turnip...
The beet is the murderer
returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry
finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon,
bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded
moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once
connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for
rubies.
The beet was Rasputin's
favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
So that’s why I didn’t take
any of the lovely red beets we harvested from the last of the cool season
veggies yesterday. I took perfectly respectable beet greens from the harvest. Fortunately, we got over 3 lbs of beets, plus another 2 lbs of greens. Because that
almost-ripe strawberry didn’t go far.
And plus beets taste like
dirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment