Beets Me

Beets, those humble root vegetables, come in a lot of different shapes and colors. There are red beets and white beets, golden beets and rainbow beets, candycane beets and baby beets, and this would all be very Seussian were it not for the existence of an heirloom variety called "Bull's Blood," which is definitely something I want to serve at my next ritual sacrifice.

Then there are what I like to call "Monster Beets."

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Ferment Me, Baby

On Monday night, I went to see Sandor Katz extol the virtues of fermentation. It wasn't really a lecture and it wasn't really a workshop, since his demonstration consisted of stuffing a pile of already-cut, already-salted vegetables into a mason jar and declaring it sauerkraut. But the man really knows his stuff, and he wants you to know it too! I confess that I might have spent most of the lengthy Q-and-A admiring his impressive arrangement of facial hair, which the internet tells me is called a 'Franz Josef,' but that is only because an anthropology major asked him to expound on the intangible connection between human culture and a culture of bacteria. In any case, I just bought his latest book, The Art of Fermentation, and it's really funny to alternate chapters of this with Faulkner, let me tell you.

All this got me to thinking that my store of kimchi was running tragically low.

onwards »