As a kid I utterly loathed beetroot. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t beetroot’s fault, but the way it was prepared – grated and pickled to death. Fast forward a few (OK, quite a few!) decades and those bottles of grated beetroot still grace our supermarket shelves. And it’s still not my cup of tea. [...]
There are ping-pong balls secreted away under every bed, chair, cupboard and couch in my house. Do I have a fetish? No, I have a cat. Which means soccer games at odd times, day and night, up and down the passage. The floors are wooden. The racket is frightful. The excitement is fever pitch. I can identify with this kind [...]
BEETROOT – a small word that elicits a huge response. Few people are in the neutral camp when it comes to this veggie. You have your loathers and your lovers and that’s pretty much it. I have nothing empirical to base this on, but I figure when we hear the word, most of us automatically think of bottled beetroot in [...]
I’ve heard plenty about the apparent nesting instincts of pregnant women. Now given that the closest I’ve ever come to pregnant, is a ‘pregnant pause’, I’m hardly in a position to comment on its veracity. What I do know is that, come 1 March, a switch is magically flipped and I start gearing up for full-on nesting. After months of [...]
My gran didn’t mess around with produce. Like any halfway-decent farmer’s wife, her pantry was loaded with things preserved in giant Consol bottles. I seem to remember (not fondly) that at least half of it was beetroot. Preserving it in vinegar was the only culinary game plan. You couldn’t pay me to eat it as an 8-year old. Fortunately I [...]
There are some things that were just made for each other… Merlot and me, chocolate and orange, tomatoes and basil and, of course, goat’s cheese and beetroot. I’m getting a bit bored of seeing the two combined in a salad though. Bored is dangerous in my kitchen, as that’s when I go into ‘what if’ mode. What if I [...]