Beets

I brought huge golden and red beets home from the produce market with great expectations. After I put them on to boil, the smell wafted through the house, and I caught myself in a daydream. I guess my mom cooked fresh beets when I was a kid. The pungent aroma reminded me of her dinners. I recalled her salad of iceberg lettuce and sliced beets. I hated beets then. Things have changed. After years of culinary school, food-television viewing, and eating beets every way possible, I have been reformed.

One of the best tastes of summer has to be beets. Beets show up colorfully atop the goat-cheese ravioli at Mirabella Cafe, in Cherry Hill. Chef-owner Joe Palombo roasts and cubes yellow and red Chiogga heirloom beets and even reduces beets as the sauce. Fried shallots and toasted pine nuts add crunch. Tria, the Center City wine-cheese-beer salons, offers them in a roasted beet jam (an earthy puree of beets, balsamic vinegar, honey, Dijon and red onion) served with a wedge of Haystack Mountain's Haystack Peak cheese.

Of all the maligned vegetables, none rank higher in the Vegephobes List of the 10 Most Hated than those that can trace their roots back to roots. You know the culprits - beets, parsnips, turnips, celeriacs, rutabagas, kohlrabies - names that force all but the most ardent vegetarian to seek asylum at the nearest fast-food stand. Some of us have been so successful at dodging these healthful wonders that we've never tasted them at all. (But we know we wouldn't like them.) And for the few who have ventured a taste?

'Simplicity is everything. " With that brief acceptance speech, chef John Kennedy summed up his approach to food. His remark also may reflect the judges' collective thinking in choosing Kennedy as winner of the Great American Salad Toss competition this month. Kennedy's artful composition of heirloom baby beets and greens maintained the true tastes and textures of his ingredients. As executive chef at Dakin House, the private dining mansion of Merck & Co. in Somerville, N.J., Kennedy values honesty in food.

It was time to bring out your best beets and dandiest dandelions. The Norristown Garden Club held it annual show Wednesday and Thursday at Plymouth Meeting Mall. Ribbons and awards were given in 66 classes.

Fill the oven on Sunday evening, for instance, and you can get a week's worth of homemade fast food. Here's the scenario: Put two racks in the oven and set the heat at 375 degrees. Roast a large chicken - or two chickens - or a small turkey, a pork loin or something else that's fairly lean. (Vegetarians may skip this part.) Also roast roughly three times as many potatoes as you need for a meal. Roast a lot of beets - put a thin layer of water in a shallow pan, add the rinsed but otherwise untouched beets (save the tops for greens)

Where the turning seasons still mean something, the vegetables of autumn have a unique poignancy, a "get it while you can" quality that makes the simplest salad special. Yet the chilly nights that spell the end of snap beans, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants also bring sweetness to Swiss chard and kale. Tender lettuces flourish; beets and leeks are in prime condition. Fresh shell beans make their brief appearance. The potato harvest is in. Soon enough it will be the winter squash and cabbage time, but for a brief moment we have the best of all worlds: high summer and harvest both at once, gardens and markets overflowing, some of just about everything - except peas, of course, but you can't have it all. Though tomatoes and peppers are available in some form year round, the time when they are fresh, local, inexpensive, and, in the case of tomatoes, tasty, is about to be over for most of us. So if you have the freezer space, now's the time to put plenty by for future enjoyment.

We were waiting for Jah. Not Jah, the deity, but Jah the farmer, a.k.a. dreadlocked farmer Matt Bruckler 3d, who was supposed to deliver our first box of organic vegetables from his farm, Jah's Creation, in Egg Harbor Township. But it was late at night, and Jah had still not arrived. On opposite ends of our town, my friend Joan and I waited, and then once the boxes had arrived, close to midnight on that hectic first week, we wondered. What would we do with all that kale?

Admittedly, kielbasa isn't the sexiest item in the deli case, but it is perhaps the most versatile. The garlicky smoked meat has been the base of many clean-out-the-refrigerator dinners. Best of all, when the well-flavored kielbasa is an ingredient, my impromptu specials are well-received. The hits include a skillet dinner of sauteed onions, garlic, caraway seeds, cabbage and kielbasa; cooked lentils with kielbasa, either served hot as a stew or cold in a salad; bean soup with kielbasa; grilled kielbasa with onions and a mustard sauce, and kielbasa and sweet-potato soup.

The headlights cut into the cold, dawn drizzle blanketing Weld County Road 27 as farmers in trucks and tractors slowly file toward the beet fields once tilled by Elmer Schledewitz. It is a dreary day, a Sunday that promises only muddy labor that will keep the farmers from their own crops, or from church, or from a few hours of rest in the brief, feverish harvest season. Still, the vehicles keep coming to the 90-acre field of scraggly green leaves that mark where the sugar beets are buried.

For the beets: 4 medium yellow beets 1 to 2 teaspoons olive oil A few pinches sea salt 2 tablespoons agave nectar For the risotto: 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 teaspoon diced ginger 1 teaspoon diced garlic 1 cup sliced shiitake mushroom caps 2 cups arborio rice Approximately 1 to 2 teaspoons sea salt, to taste 5 cups water 1 cup soy or almond milk 1/4 cup...

A new weapon against snow and ice was used on selected Chester County roads and sidewalks this winter - beet juice. It was added to the salt-based brine put on roads before storms and enabled the solution to work at lower temperatures. But those trying to recall whether there were swaths of red-stained concrete, don't bother. "There's no redness at all," said Jack Stewart, a project manager for the county's Facilities Department. "When you put it down, it's more brownish and looks like the road is wet. " The substance is a by-product of sugar beets, which are used to make sweetener and animal feed, officials said.

If you were served canned beets as a child and not permitted to leave the table until they were all gone, you may not be so thrilled to learn that we're now in the thick of beet season. But take heart, stalwart members of the Clean Plate Club: Fresh beets, if you haven't had the fortitude to try them yet, bear little resemblance to the canned stuff. "I never liked beets until I ate them in a restaurant and they were fresh," said Charles "Chip" Roman, who grew up in Fishtown suffering from canned beet syndrome but nonetheless became a respected chef.

With these lengthening days of spring, I long for the first fresh green foods from the garden and the ephemeral early gifts from streams and forests. I've already been able to harvest a bit of hardy lettuce, mache, spinach, arugula and scallions - plants started last fall and kept cozy in a simple wood box with windows on top, called a cold frame. Every week since early March, I've sowed a few rows of lettuces, escarole, kales, beets, carrots, peas and radishes outside. The result is a garden full of seedlings in various states of maturity.

One of my great disappointments over the last decade has been the failure of Philadelphia chefs to draw meaningful inspiration from the living tradition of country cooking that surrounds us. Yes, the "local food" movement has happily flourished, but mainly with ingredients, our farm markets blossoming with everything from free-range poultry to pawpaws and heirloom beets. But when it comes to actually tapping the rustic foodways of say, Lancaster County, our city cooks inevitably lose interest once they've played with a bit of Cope's corn and a pretzel crust or two. Of course, getting a taste of the real item takes determination, especially with a community as closed to outsiders as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

We were waiting for Jah. Not Jah, the deity, but Jah the farmer, a.k.a. dreadlocked farmer Matt Bruckler 3d, who was supposed to deliver our first box of organic vegetables from his farm, Jah's Creation, in Egg Harbor Township. But it was late at night, and Jah had still not arrived. On opposite ends of our town, my friend Joan and I waited, and then once the boxes had arrived, close to midnight on that hectic first week, we wondered. What would we do with all that kale?

I used to think it wasn't possible to have too much of a good thing, and for the longest time, that was my sentiment regarding our abbondanza of Italian BYOBs. Who doesn't want a go-to trattoria for an affordable plate of pasta and a juicy branzino within a short walk of home? And yet, when Novità opened its doors on the 1600 block of South Street in the fall, the realization that there were nearly a dozen Italian BYOBs now within a five-block radius had an unexpected effect.

A simple soup was the plan. But it called for potatoes, and by 1 p.m. last Sunday, the red, white, and blue potatoes - some of them thumb-size fingerlings - had been snapped up under the old, brick shambles at the Headhouse Farmers Market, Second and Lombard. Their basket was still on the table, tantalizingly (reprovingly?) empty. The Sunday market runs 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. You snooze, you lose. No soup for you! Don't let the photograph fool you: That's a preview of what's to come, the market in high season, cascades of fresh onions and beets, spotlit under sunflowers by the bucket.

I brought huge golden and red beets home from the produce market with great expectations. After I put them on to boil, the smell wafted through the house, and I caught myself in a daydream. I guess my mom cooked fresh beets when I was a kid. The pungent aroma reminded me of her dinners. I recalled her salad of iceberg lettuce and sliced beets. I hated beets then. Things have changed. After years of culinary school, food-television viewing, and eating beets every way possible, I have been reformed.

One of the best tastes of summer has to be beets. Beets show up colorfully atop the goat-cheese ravioli at Mirabella Cafe, in Cherry Hill. Chef-owner Joe Palombo roasts and cubes yellow and red Chiogga heirloom beets and even reduces beets as the sauce. Fried shallots and toasted pine nuts add crunch. Tria, the Center City wine-cheese-beer salons, offers them in a roasted beet jam (an earthy puree of beets, balsamic vinegar, honey, Dijon and red onion) served with a wedge of Haystack Mountain's Haystack Peak cheese.