The Balm of Canned Beets

7Feb14

When the earth feels locked in snow and Arctic cold, and the garden is merely a box of seeds and sketches on graph paper, a body and a soul miss the sensations of the earth-- the rich fungus-y scent of the turned earth after a rain; the piping call of the Robin defending the muddy, earthworm-y terrain of his garden territory; the yellow-green growth washing into the woods canopy and rising up from the renewed earth.  Plotting out lettuce beds in my mind, watering the blue-green broccoli seedlings by the windowsill, poring over pithy descriptions of heirloom sweet potatoes in the Sand Hill Preservation Center catalog keep the thrill of gardening alive in my soul, but my body still asks for connection with the earth.  

A new discovery for our life on Hawk’s Hill this winter has been the earthy taste of home-canned beets.  Fat, juicy, ruby-colored slices of Red Ace beets canned the 16th of October last year have sustained our need for a taste of the earth.  Pop the canning lid off of the wide mouth mason jar, heat in the microwave for 3 minutes, inhale the loamy scent as the steam rises from the glass jar, and fork heaps of the deep magenta slices onto your plate for lunch.  Like a miniature sauna for the olfactory system, the scent of cooked beets notifies your body it’s about to receive folate, potassium, copper, manganese, iron, magnesium, and phosphorus.  

Last winter, this time, I was still enjoying fresh beets from the garden, dug out of the snow, then scrubbed, peeled and shredded with apple to make a crunchy winter salad (I used Helen Nearing’s recipe for Beet & Apple Salad II from Simple Food for the Good Life).  A little lemon juice and honey took the bite from the raw beets.  And, digging the raw beets up out of the snow felt like victory in February.

In our experience, home-canned beets taste better than the metal-canned flavor of commercially canned beets, and have a better texture than the cooked beets I froze in the deep freeze.  Fresh is best, but on a homestead, fresh foods are finite, and canning allows me to feed the family deeper into the winter with garden produce.

To top off my soul’s food of beets for lunch today, I turned my back to the sunlight streaming in the south kitchen windows, feeling the heat of the sun soak into my black shirt, and played a couple of YouTube videos of American Robins singing in the spring, like this backyard Robin recording and this one from The Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. I invite you to join me in a pre-concert psych-up for spring, and if you've got some, have a plateful of beets for me.

Wishing you the warmth of a sunny window,

Betsy