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.
