We've got the beet
we've got the beet
we've got the beet
yeah, we got it!
 
I woke up this morning with this Go Go's tune in my head.  Farmer Paige had been singing this earlier last week as we were washing the beets and it's gotten under my skin.  Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, no one knows the rest of the words.  In the field we human jukeboxes are very susceptible to each others' tunes  -- the waves often carry over and I'm left with partial songs on repeat for hours at a time until a new song breaks into the loop. 

And yes, we've got the beets.  During the weekend market, Chef Hilary from The Hil Restaurant came out and did a demo making Pickled Beets and Eggs with Cucumber Dill Sauce.  It was delicious!  Deep red - tinted hard boiled eggs.  It brought me back to Pennsylvania with the Pennsylvania Dutch thrive on pickled beets.  I've eaten beets before, but never been the one to prepare them.   Over Father's Day weekend, I visited my cousins and subjected them to my first beet cooking experience.  I boiled, peeled, and chopped them thin and added salt and balsamic vinegar.  Everyone dutifully ate some - the proof being a lot of red tongued folks, but I walked away with a Tupperware of them at the end of the meal.  Over the next week, I combined those leftovers with mashed potatoes which made for the most colorful mashed potatoes you ever did see!  This has opened a whole new door for coloring foods...I believe bread is the next on the list.  Beet bread, anyone? 

After work on Friday, Farmer Paige, Farmer Justin and I treated ourselves to dinner at the Hil Restaurant (wow, second time this has come up, and nope, I'm not getting paid for that).  I ordered the veggie plate and lo and behold it was indeed all vegetables from Serenbe Farms, I've handled at least in one part of the process or another  all of those vegetables -each prepared in a different manner.  Carrots (roasted), kale (cooked and then stir fried), beets (not exactly sure how they were done, but really smooth and buttery), kohlrabi (sautéed and still crunch in the middle J) and squash (casserole!  My favorite, bread crumbs on top and everything).  It was lovely to get out and eat our vegetables without having to cook them, and then for the best part: hanging out with The Hil owners Chef Hilary and Jim White.  They are wonderful people. 

Sunday night, with Stephanie's mad organizing skills, was movie night in Atlanta: Food Inc..  If you haven't had the chance, or time, to read Micheal Pollen's Omnivore's Dilemma or Eric Schlosser's
Fast Food Nation, I highly recommend Robert Kenner's documentary.  The opening credits alone are reason enough to see it:  Nightmare Before Christmas meets Home Alone type music while strolling through the grocery store questioning the pastoral images on packaging used to sell the products.  The movie covers all kinds of topics: from a large scale chicken breeding operation to a grass fed beef operation to social issues related to these farms, or rather "food industry" and e coli food scales.

(Click on Food, Inc. logo to watch the trailer on You Tube.)
 
Sensational, colorful and very vague this is one emotional ride through today's food system.  Monsanto's response to the film (taken from their website): "Unfortunately, Food, Inc. is counter-productive to the serious dialogue surrounding the critical topic of our nation's food supply".  Should being an educated consumer be counter-productive?  In any case, I enjoyed the movie and clearly the guy behind me did too as he turned to his girlfriend at the end to say "Let's go grab a burger".