"The Glorious Beeches" 24 x 30 glaze oil This morning my neighbour remarked to me that winter was here. I was about to agree when it struck me that somehow we had skipped autumn. The trees are still green but we've all turned our furnaces on and I'm making soup.
In particular, beet soup. Beets were ten pounds for $1.44 this week so I hauled a bag home. My hopes of roasting them evaporated when I realized that there were only five; each one was roughly the size of Rhode Island and as such would take hours to roast. Necessity being a mother, I peeled one, sliced it, and am going the microwave route. If that approach fails to sweeten them sufficiently, it will be borscht in Jon's lunch for the foreseeable future. If it works, however, I'm going back to the store.
Or I suppose I could dye anything that isn't already magenta. Yes, I believe that beets are more blue red than autumn's cadmium red. I noticed that first at age 10, when I lost control of a cooked beet at a Sunday dinner and rolled it across my aunt's white damask table cloth. The room went silent. My mother and I imitated a beet. It's the only root vegetable that still scares me a little. But beets occupy two moments in my history. The second memory is of the sweet smell of sugar beets being processed quite some distance from our home; walking back to school after lunch in the autumn, we were wrapped in the aroma of what smelled like cookies and forever after, whenever I smell cookies baking, I am a young teenager again on my way to school in the fall.
But this year it may be necessary to find red on the plate. And even if I have to rely on old paintings of a satisfactory technicolor autumn to find those cadmium reds, but at least beet red has reported for duty in person. I have the pink teeth to prove it.
In particular, beet soup. Beets were ten pounds for $1.44 this week so I hauled a bag home. My hopes of roasting them evaporated when I realized that there were only five; each one was roughly the size of Rhode Island and as such would take hours to roast. Necessity being a mother, I peeled one, sliced it, and am going the microwave route. If that approach fails to sweeten them sufficiently, it will be borscht in Jon's lunch for the foreseeable future. If it works, however, I'm going back to the store.
Or I suppose I could dye anything that isn't already magenta. Yes, I believe that beets are more blue red than autumn's cadmium red. I noticed that first at age 10, when I lost control of a cooked beet at a Sunday dinner and rolled it across my aunt's white damask table cloth. The room went silent. My mother and I imitated a beet. It's the only root vegetable that still scares me a little. But beets occupy two moments in my history. The second memory is of the sweet smell of sugar beets being processed quite some distance from our home; walking back to school after lunch in the autumn, we were wrapped in the aroma of what smelled like cookies and forever after, whenever I smell cookies baking, I am a young teenager again on my way to school in the fall.
But this year it may be necessary to find red on the plate. And even if I have to rely on old paintings of a satisfactory technicolor autumn to find those cadmium reds, but at least beet red has reported for duty in person. I have the pink teeth to prove it.
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