I love beets!

They’re so beautiful and have that weird sweet and earthy taste, that’s sometimes too much, and sometimes just right.

Look at that colour!

Here’s one of the smaller, round ones:

Once I tried to grow beets in my tiny urban garden (literally a box of dirt, but it works). They turned out like this:

… Very small!

I found out that I should have picked some of them out to make room for other ones to grow big. I told my colleagues at the time about it and someone was very nice and gave me some giant ones from their garden. I pickled them and all was good, and I never tried growing my own beets again. But I guess now I know what to do, so I should try again.

Beets are on my mind, because I made some hummus a couple of days ago and put in a couple of baked beets. The hummus was amazingly pink and tasted and felt very spring-like in spite of the season. It turns out it doesn’t take a lot to excite me, when it comes to food. The beets I used looked a bit more like this, though:

It’s a difficult season to find good vegetables, especially local and organic ones. But these were both, and they tasted very nice. I find that baking them and peeling the skin off afterwards makes them more tasty than boiling them.

That was a lot of thoughts about beets, congrats for reading this far! Here’s a a fun fact:

I drew the first two of the beet doodles today while talking to my mum on the phone. (Not about beets, though, mainly about what we’re baking at the moment and what the rest of the family are up to).

*Update: After posting this I went and googled “beets”, and I can see that I totally drew the leaves wrong. They have long pink stems! Anyway it goes to show how little I remember about actual vegetables coming from the ground and not the store. I’ll remember next time I’m drawing a bunch of beets 😀