Bonus Recipe: Parmesan Chard

 “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly  serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens
when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn
moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat
stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to
the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”

― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

There are a lot of recipes in A Feast of Ice and Fire involving beets. The bonus here is that beet greens (a type of chard) are damn near the most delicious of the green leafies, imho.  They are just lovely juiced or boiled with onion.  Today I did something a little different:

 

 

Heat 2-3 tbsp Olive Oil and 2-3 cloves minced garlic in your pan, toss in the beet greens, includin those lurid pink stems!  Cook until all is wilted and some is blackened.  Add 1 tbsp lemon juice and Parmesan cheese.