I'm with you, gentle reader, I don't know what the hell it is either. It came into my kitchen in a white bag with a few other produce items. A red pepper, some sweet potatoes and something I was thinking of as little, retarded potatoes, but I'm now fairly certain is ginger.
Tonally the composition had a nice, beige-y winter tone, the plastic deli bag lending it a bit of ghetto Edward Weston street cred. It sat out on my kitchen counter for several days as I tried to suss what it was and what the hell I could do with it.
As luck would have it, I bumped into Niama the next day at lunch. She was there when I got the mystery item--in the world of animal, vegetable, mineral, I had pretty much deduced veggie--and I explained my assignment to her: to write about a food item being as descriptive as possible as if the person reading had never tasted it. She nodded serenely. "I'm thinking winter root vegetable," I said. She nodded serenely again.
The day after bumping into Niama, I saw my nutritionist, Sarah. She was much stricter vis-a-vis confirm or deny. "I'm thinking of boiling it," I tell her. "That would be wise for any vegetable," comes her koan-like reply. "How long?" I ask, a little desperate now. She frowns. She doesn't want to give it away, but suggests 40 minutes, which is great advice because I would have maxed at ten, but then I'm over eager to figure out what the hell this thing is. I tell her I suspect it's a rutabaga. She sniffs.The night before my first food writing assignment is due, I decide to at least wash it. I'm with Jose Eber when it comes to food prep.
"Wash it like a lettuce leaf," was always the cowboy-hatted, pony-tailed wonder's hair mantra, avoiding shampoo at all costs, light years ahead of the Bushwick, no-shower movement. I tend to think all that schmutz covering this brown orb most probably has some pretty good nutritional value, but as I run it under some warm water--okay, full confession, pretending it's Jacklyn Smith's scalp--I notice a deep purple tone has been uncovered on the flesh.
I'm somewhere between Audrey Tautou's cryptologist in The Da Vinci Code and Stockard Channing when she smacked the top of the Sistine Chapel in Six Degrees.
This color is a major clue, as are the bright maroon and green sprouts coming off the top of the vegetable. I decide on chunky cut slices and as soon as the cleaver halves the mystery item, it's game over. The inside is a rich, deep red, like something out of a Vermeer painting, striated with silvery white circles likes the rings inside a tree.
It's a beet. I know it instantly. First off, there's that signature beet stank.
In an effort to better describe it, I find google links to people comparing it to cat pee and even an Erin Brockovich-y website dedicated to closing down a local sugar beet factory, or at least the large ponds the factory has set up to collect wastewater for the stinky, beet processing. I'm a little disappointed that my Audrey Tautou moment has been cut short due to the crimson riot going on inside the beet. I get briefly distracted making an Aretha Franklin-esque church hat for Mr. Gay Bunny, but it ends tragically when her face becomes streaked with beet juice and she just winds up looking like a hard-partying, Versace model with a coke-induced nosebleed.
Think, think…stink. I've actually never tasted a beet, I've always thought they were kind of gross. My grandmother used to mix the beet juice with hard boiled, deviled eggs as if the sharp beet odor simply weren't enough for her. I always used to pass on this particularly noxious concoction at family dinners and have maybe in my adult life had some beet cubes tossed into fancy salads, but there was a lot more going on in those dishes and, really, who wants to be the one picking beet cubes out of the rocket. How will that person be invited back?
Okay, cut to the chase, now that I know it's a beet, I get to it. It's probably too soon, but I fish one out of the wok and onto some white china. Even before I slice into it, the juice has begun to stain the plate. I slice though the disc with a knife and am surprised by how easily it yields. I was expecting it to still be a little tough and stringy, but the biggest surprise is when it hits my tongue and how sweet it is. The sweetness dissipates a bit and an after-taste I can only describe as "beety" lingers on the palate. I fish out the rest of the chunky discs and will cube them up for a fancy salad later.
But the wheels are still spinning. Most of the beet recipes I googled suggest boiling in more or less the same manner, but almost all recommend collecting the beet water that remains. Slightly worried about my neighbors forming an Erin Brockovich-led collation to stamp out the decaying beet juice wafting out from under my door, I pour the just-boiled concoction into a silver pitcher and put it in the fridge. I'm thinking sustainable Easter eggs, crunchy tie-die, an eggplant hair rinse that would probably end badly, like and the prom scene from Carrie, but then it comes to me: a cocktail!Of course, a beet juice and lemon vodka! Why the hell not?
The Breslin at the Ace Hotel has interpreted this trend into pretty tasty, chilled Jameson and pickle juice shooters they call The Pickle Back. I'd been experimenting on the Russian variation--those crazy Ruskies love a pickle as chaser with chilled vodka shots--as a signature cocktail for a friend of mine who's recently starting doing a drag character called Pickles. Just as the pickle brine offset the bite of the vodka, I expected the sweetness of the beet juice to also mellow the citrus vodka. Plus, how pretty it will be?
So I chopped some ice, added some citrus vodka and then crushed in some sea salt before I garnished. Sea salt? "Whu-whuuut?" Yes, sea salt. And it worked. The result was a mouthful. Very vodka, but with subtle underpinnings of salted beet. I liked it. Mr. Gay Bunny liked it. We both fell down. Now we just needed a name. Vodka Beet Down, anyone? Delicious!
