Voluptuous beets

This flash slideshow shows you some of the ways I have used our beet¹s lately.We have eaten about half of our first batch of red beets (some of the other beets we have planted include: Shiraz Tall Top Beet, Chioggia Beet, Lutz Salad Leaf Beet, Yellow Mangel Beet). Their greens are starting to look mighty ragged so we will be accelerating our beet-feasts to catch them before they simply go bad in the ground.Various recipes have been or will be blogged at my food blog Nika’s Culinaria.The one dish that has the yellow disk like item (its polenta) was blogged at this post “The unbearable intensity of homegrown food” and it is called “Homegrown organic beets and greens served over beet juice infused polenta², dribbled with a beet, garlic, apricot gastrique“.I think I like the following detail photo especially because it shows the dark voluptuous nature of the beet along with some of it’s delicate inner leaves. These leaves are revealed sometimes when you pull away the much larger ones.

Slightly steamed with a sprinkle of sea salt, beets are such a lovely part of summer.

~~Definitions~~
1 beet
Definitions

1. a biennial garden plant (Beta vulgaris) of the goosefoot family that includes several cultivars (as Swiss chard and sugar beet) and that has thick edible leaves with long petioles and often swollen purplish-red roots
2. its root used especially as a vegetable, as a source of sugar, or for forage

Pronounciation: ˈbēt
Function: noun
Date: before 12th century
Etymology: Middle English bete, from Old English bēte, from Latin beta

2 polenta
Definitions

1. mush made of chestnut meal, cornmeal, semolina, or farina

Pronounciation: pō-ˈlen-tə, pə-, -ˌt?
Function: noun
Date: 1764
Etymology: Italian, from Latin, crushed and hulled barley; akin to Latin pollen fine flour