Gimme a beet!

The farm from which the veggies for my CSA come is hitting its summer vegetable stride, I think. This week we got green beans, pea pods, onions, two big things of lettuce (not iceberg, but some other unidentified variety), and carrots. Oh, and beets.

We've been getting beets for a few weeks, but honestly I've just been throwing mine away because I don't know what to do with them (for shame!). The only thing I've ever really seen done with beets is to make red beet eggs, which I never wanted to touch with a 10-foot pole growing up... although I admit I would probably not mind it today now that my tastebuds have matured a bit. Ok, a lot.

Well, I must have been inspired by the beer I had in Philly over the 4th of July. Magic Hat's summer seasonal ale is called Wacko, which is colored pink with beet juice (and, I must add, is a perfect beer for me: nice flavor, not much of a bite, and, well, a superfun color). So when I saw the beets yesterday, I decided I was going to find something to do with them this week.

It's kind of funny how the standard Good Housekeeping cookbook always seems to have a solution, even though it's never the first place I look. I found a recipe for orange-glazed beets that seemed more simple than others, so I took a stab at it... fully expecting to detest it. But lo and behold, even though it had a little too much glaze because I think my beets are smaller than average, it was delicious.

I made it with polynesian chicken, which I always serve over rice to absorb extra flavor. On the plate, it looked like a complete mismatch: bland brownish chicken, white rice (ughhh I meant to get brown but in my confusion upon finding that Giant Eagle no longer sells my normal package of rice, I totally misread the Uncle Ben's label and now have a 5-pound bag of shopping mistake), and violently pink beets.

Usually I serve polynesian chicken with broccoli, which is dull enough in color to keep the plate uniformly muted, but this was a sight to see. I would have taken a picture but my camera is full of camp pictures - more on that to come. But anyway, it was actually really good - the orange from the beet glaze faded right into the pineapple hints in the chicken marinade.

And now I leave you with a song from Doug's The Beets from my childhood: