annieb

Love beets. I'm convinced my marriage is in part based on my husband's love of beets, all the men in the family growing up hated them so we only ate them on women's night in. And I like the plain old fashioned red beets. The other ones look impressive, but they don't taste as much like dirt (Mamster, you read my mind). The fact that local farmers markets have jumped on the fancy beet bandwagon is a real disappointment. One of our local farmers a couple years ago had these HUGE beets called Lutes beets. They were supposed to be huge. They were so excellent roasted. Unfortunately, they didn't sell well and he doesn't grow them anymore. Try some fresh sorrel, minced like an herb, with your parsley on the beets. It's good. For you amateur botanists and gardeners out there, a beet seed is actually a cluster of seeds, which explains all that pesky thinning. Shepherd's Seeds carries a Dutch cultivar, Monopole I think it's called, that is actually a single seed. A great back saver.

I am a complete neophyte to France, having returned from my first visit. But I come from a family of food and cooks and company. And on my first visit to France, was lucky enough to stay with friends who are working farmers in the Auvergne. The food was excellent. The shopping. The company. But the food is a subject of conversation, mixed among others. And we are talking about great farmhouse food, homemade saucisson, pate, an assortment of cheese straight from local farms, vegetables picked daily from the market gardeners across the road. We don't have the budget for "any stars", but did enjoy excellent meals in places like Laguiole, Albi, Castres, Narbonne, Carcassonne. In Castres especially, we had time to kill and sought out a restaurant, inspected the menu (love that custom, so much better than the yellowing restaurant review in the window we get here in Chicago), and plunged in. Spacious. Decently priced for value. Excellent food. Several tables of business associates. Several tables of elderly men eating alone. This is the culture we don't have here.

While driving from Geneva to visit friends who live west of Moulins, we were subjected to the worst kind of village death. Once you get off the toll road, you are on the only road that cuts west to Bordeaux, two lane. Apparently all the villages en route lobbied to have the road go through the center of the village, thinking that an alternate route would spell death. What you have is wall to wall truck traffic, villages where no one can stop (almost literally!) because the traffic is so thick and there's no place to pull over in front of a cafe, for instance, and signs all along the route that proclaim "X persons died in the next X kilometres since X date", and always really shocking in the high death rate. What I really want to know is, why can't supermarkets in the US sell cooked, vacu-packed beets? Beets are much loved in our household, and while there are times that cooking them yourself (as I did last night) is welcome, we would eat them about 3 times as much if I could buy them like in France. Oh, yeah, and puff pastry (fresh, not frozen) made with actual butter?

Here in Chicago at a small Oaxacan restaurant with a very gifted cook, I had chilaquiles enfrijoladas. They were very good, lots of epazote in the beans.

I had dinner (with five others) last summer at Tapawingo and it was wonderful. I love beets, and generally think golden beets are not as earthy as I like my beets, but the golden beet soup was a revelation. I've wanted to eat at Tapawingo for many years and finally got to. If you do a google search on Tapawingo you'll find out some history of the place. The owner is a refugee from the car business, I believe, and cooked at the Rowe Inn before opening Tapawingo. The restaurant has been added on to since it opened, and has beautiful gardens around it. I'll be up that way later this summer and may try to go for lunch, if I can find somebody willing to go with.