LolaGeek

When we went to Lambertville this spring, and when Jess and I went out for lunch and pedicures a couple weeks ago, I had delicious beet salads. The one at No. 6 was roasted beet with baby greens of some sort, blue cheese, and I think walnuts. The one I had with Jess was roasted beets, fava beans, almonds, and goat cheese. I’ve been wanting to make my own beet salad, but was nervous about the beets making a mess in my kitchen.

The other day a recipe for a beet salad popped up in my RSS reader, and I figured it was a sign and I’d just go for it. So I got all the ingredients (baby greens, beets, goat cheese, and candied pecans in this one) and looked up directions on how to roast beets. It actually wasn’t hard at all, and nothing got stained!

To roast the beets, you cut off the stems, scrub them, and put them on one side of a piece of tin foil. Then drizzle with olive oil and fold the foil over and fold up all the edges to make a packet. Then bake at 375-400 for about 30-60 minutes (it depends on the size and age of the beets – just poke them periodically to see when they get soft). When they’re done, let them get cool enough to handle, then use your hands to peel the skins off – they pretty much come right off. And my hands didn’t get stained or anything.

I cooked six beets last night and put two of them on my salad for dinner. It was delicious! The goat cheese – yum! I kind of could have done without the candied pecans – plain almonds or walnuts would have been better, in my opinion.

Here’s the TMI part: This morning I got up, went to the bathroom, turned around to flush, and – OMG, is that blood in the toilet?! I was freaking out. I’ve been kind of having tummy troubles recently, and thought this meant I was getting worse, not better. I worried all morning as I got ready for work, thinking, “I hope that was just beet juice or something…”

Turns out, there’s something called beeturia, which is having red or pink urine after eating beets. Even though I’ve eaten beets before, it seems like this condition depends on a lot of factors of both the beets and the eater. The general internet consensus is that it isn’t anything to worry about, though some people say it could be a sign of certain allergies or deficiencies. Also, everything I’ve seen written about it says that it affects 10-14% of the population, but if you Google it, it looks like tons of people have experienced this, so I wonder how rare it really is.

Anyway, that was my little internal bleeding scare of the day! I will probably skip the beet salad tonight, just to make sure everything has cleared up, but if I’m looking better by tomorrow morning, maybe I’ll have another one for lunch tomorrow – it really was delicious!