Next week? Baked Alsation ala alrugara.

Puppy!

I may not be a puppy, but I'm damn cute all the same.

Furry puppy for JZ

Beets frightened me for most of my life; pickled, roasted or plain, they just looked weird and wrong and I avoided them like mad except in the form of borscht with lots of sour cream. I can't remember when I actually attempted to eat one, except that it was fairly recently, but it turns out that I like them very much indeed, and could have been loving them up for the past three decades if I hadn't been so weird about it. Yet another sorry chapter in my wasted youth (and what a waste of a wasted youth, really, to be wasting it on things like not eating beets).

Our favoritest restaurant, which closed a few years ago so they could put up a fugly office building in its place, offered a pickle plate as an appetizer. And while it was eternally delicious, one of the things on the plate was a sliced beet. I've never cottoned to beets because I remember them being that sort of canned-cranberry-sauce sort of soggy-slipperiness. So, I typically left them alone.

One night, the co-owner of the restaurant, and the person that did the pickling to begin with, was our server. She came by to pick up my dispatched-except-for-the-beet plate and had this look of horror on her face.

"You didn't eat the beet?" "Well, I never liked beets as a kid."

She stood there for a second, then said, "Well, my husband won't eat them either. But I love them. And we're still married."

I tried a pickled beet the next time we were there. Delightful. But I've realized that it's very much an adult vegetable that denotes you as a grown-up. Few kids would eat pickled beets without duress.

Another puppy for JZ.

Spoooooky

This an odd power. I can do anything at all to a puppy inbetween these posts.

Chihuanhua-On-A-Stick, for example.

Chard is so good! We ate it all the time growing up, with malt vinegar.

My son has a total fauxhawk. The hair on the top of his head is about 4 inches long, and the rest is so blond you barely notice it. I should dress him up as Billy Idol for Halloween.

Ths is Lily, only not blond. Also, there is length at the nape, because it hasn't been rubbed down by sleep, so she's basically got New Wave hair from hell.

I'm with the sauce-loving heritics.

Gus says Chihuahua-on-stick, and all I can think of is that thing on America's Funniest Videos where there are dogs, and linoleum floors, and sticks, and the dog through its own inordinate sense of "fun" ends up acting like a mop.

Oh, and I love beets in all forms and always have. Raw, cooked, pickled, pureed--all good.

They're sweet and frequently a bright red, people. What's not to love?