And the Beet Goes On

Sometimes you just get a certain food stuck in your head, or maybe it is more apt to say, stuck in your stomach. Like a nagging craving, the flavor is gnawing at you like a dog gnaws on a prized bone. I have always been one to give into these cravings. I figure, if your body is crying out for precious food-- give it what it wants! This is of course assuming that what your body is crying out for is not an entire pint of Fudge Ripple ice cream or a large, oozy pizza, extra anchovies.

I have been thinking a lot about beets lately, in all of their many incarnations. Roasted, steamed, boiled, sauteed, or shredded. Beets have become my Fudge Ripple ice cream. I know, I know, you're probably saying, "Beets? Beets? Come on, you have got to be kidding me. Now this girl is going to wax poetic about the beauty of beets?" And to this I have only one comment to make-- wax on.

I was at the farmers' market recently, with a few moments to kill before I had to be at work. The day was blustery, the trees barren, the ground damp from the chilling rain of the night before. The market was dead. Many of the vendors had taken the morning off, due to the inclement weather. There was a table of the requisite apples/apple stuff (cider, dried apple rings, apple cake), a pathetic table of onions, a few winter squash, and the largest head of cabbage, with the droopiest leaves I had seen in quite some time. There was honey, lots of honey, and there was a lone table of fresh pasta. Amidst piles of durum wheat penne, and semolina angel hair, there were a few containers of beet fettucine.

Now I'm not usually big on colored pasta. They can be so... 80's. I can still taste the tri-color pasta corkscrew salad, with sundried tomatoes, sliced black olives, drenched in Wishbone dressing. Come on, I know that you remember them too. But this fresh fettucine was lovely to look at, a dusty magenta, smooth, and soft. And besides, it was beet, how bad could it be?

I bought some, and brought it home for dinner that night. When boiled it shirked the fine coating of dusty flour, and turned deeply garnet. I grated a few beets (and have the finger-stained evidence to prove it), and sauteed slowly until tender with a few sprigs of fragrant rosemary. I browned a few tablespoon of butter in a separate pan, and added a small handful of poppyseeds, then added the butter to the beets. A quick toss with the pasta, and a very pink dinner was ready.

Eating this pasta, was rather like eating in the dark. Pink on pink, I couldn't really see what I was eating, but I surely could taste and feel it. The sweetness of the fresh beets, the crunchy nuttiness of the poppy seeds, and the piney scent of the rosemary--my all pink supper did just the trick to satisfy a relentless craving.