The beet has always been my bête noire, the last food I genuinely hated in all forms. I wanted to like beets, I really did. They're so pretty. The stunning magenta of borscht, baby red and yellow beets laying like rare gemstones on a salad plate.

But I always thought they tasted like sweet dirt, with an undertone of something rotten, a whiff of burps and garbage pail. After college I lived with a girl who ate beets out of the can, enjoyed beet-and-goat cheese sandwiches piled as high as corned beef on a Katz's Deli rueben. I had to turn my head.

But it wasn't until I had a grated beet and carrot salad in vinaigrette at a bistro in Paris's Belleville neighborhood last fall that I began to understand the magic. Something about the strong vinaigrette modified the beet's rotten-ish sweetness, brought out the earthy flavors. I'm about to try this recipe, for Clotilde's Grated Carrots and Beets from the venerable Chocolate and Zucchini. Damned if that girl couldn't make a decaying sardine look like a delicacy.

I made a pot of butternut squash and carrot soup recently, but I didn't manage to take any photogenic pictures of it before I ate it all up. Luckily, I ran across this very food porn-y shot of the Ginger, Parsnip and Carrot soup that Flickr user Sonicwalker made, and my need to post a picture of orange soup has at last been quenched. If you want to make this particular soup, you can find the recipe here.

If you've made a pot of bright orange soup lately (and let's face it, who doesn't need vibrantly colored food this time of year?) head over the Slashfood Flickr group and add your pictures.

Contest alert for all you potato chip lovers out there - Kettle Chips has teamed up with Smart Car and they are holding a contest to win free chips for a year. All you have to do is visit their website and guess how many bags of potato chips they have crammed into a "For Two" Smart Car. Unlike a lot of these "guess how many" contests, they provide a rotating picture of the car so that may make it a little easier for you to count/guess.

They are also taking suggestions for new Kettle Chip flavors, so while you are there you can submit your own ideas - you can come up with something better than Carrot & Coriander or Blue Cheese with Bacon, right?

(thanks, Erica!)

I was talking to a friend earlier and was startled to find out that she thought the "baby carrots" in the market were really baby carrots. So I figured I should post about them for all of those who haven't heard the news.

In 2006, most baby carrots come from Bakersfield, California, and make up a third of sales of fresh carrots in the United States. These baby carrots are really full grown carrots that have been cut into 2" pieces and smoothed and shaped to look like baby carrots, the majority of which would have been thrown away as culls and few to cattle or just destroyed. In the late 1980's Mike Yurosek a farmer in California got tired of seeing 400 tons of carrots a day being discarded and came up with a way to shape and form them into what look like baby carrots. The rest is an American success story with raw baby carrots making up 1/3 of the sales of fresh raw carrots and are one of the top vegetables consumed in the US.

This isn't a bad thing because due to the popularity of carrots, new breeds were developed that are sweeter, less bitter and woody, crisp, and with more vitamins and beta-carotene. It used to be that you had to peel carrots so they wouldn't be too bitter to eat. Now looking back I can't remember when I did more than wash carrots before using. Peeling for me is a thing of the distant past.

My favorite thing to do with carrots (well, besides just munch on them raw, of course) is to cook them with this interesting little recipe I picked up off an episode of Good Eats some years back. It's become a staple side dish for Thanksgiving dinners, but it's equally tastey for any occasion or for none at all. Ginger ale is not the first thing I'd think to glaze my carrots with, but try it -- I find it works wonderfully, providing the perfect amount of sweetness without being overbearing. The carrots turn out tasting more essentially carroty than any raw carrot, so of course I love them. It's a pretty simple recipe and certainly worth the trouble if ever you're in the mood for carrots.

Red, yellow, green and purple - are rainbow carrots the way of the future? Perhaps, but they could more accurately be called the carrots of the past because they have a long history. Purple and yellow carrots were grown as many as 1,000 years ago in Asia and Western Europe, although selective breeding programs to produce such colors for commercial purposes are fairly recent. Carrots are now regularly bred in purple, red, yellow and white, in addition to orange, and scientists say that there is added nutritional benefit to choosing a colorful vegetable over a more conventional one.

Red carrots have extra lycopene, which is also found in tomatoes and is believed to lower blood pressure and help to reduce the risk of some cancers. Yellow carrots promote eye health with beta-carotene-like pigments, and purple carrots have powerful antioxidants.

Even with health benefits to recommend them, the carrots are not an easy sell. This is in part because neither consumers nor producers are really sure what to look for as a sign of a good purple carrot, whereas most people look for a good color and relatively smooth skin for an orange one. The bigger issue is that consumers don't know what they're going to taste like and are reluctant to branch out. But the carrots taste pretty much the same, regardless of their color, and some taste even sweeter than a standard carrot.

Some Trader Joe's locations started carrying the rainbow carrots this week, and they're worth a try if you see them there or at your local grocery store.

One of the reasons that nutritionists often recommend that you write down everything you eat is that people tend to underestimate how much they're consuming. Those extra calories, whether 10 or 100 per day, can add up over time if your physical activity levels don't change much. And, unfortunately, those 10 calories can be made up by as something as small as a few grapes and translate into a weight gain of about 1 pound per year. To avoid this, try to be honest about how much you eat and pay attention to what you're eating, even when it's "just one" of something. To give you can idea of how many calories those "ones" can have, here are a few from the Seattle Times:

• One Pringles potato chip - 10 cal
• One McDonald's french fry - 5 cal
• One grape tomato - 1 cal
• One green seedless grape - 4 cal
• One M&M - 4.3 cal
• One Jelly Belly - 4 cal
• One broccoli floret - 0.8 cal
• One baby carrot - 1.25 cal
• One cashew - 8.5 cal

The Telegraph recently raved about the Chantenay which is apparently taking the veg world by storm.

 

Now I can't claim for a minute that I have my finger on the pulse of the vibrant veg world but I hadn't even heard of a Chantenay. It turns out to be a variety of carrot. No not terribly exciting I thought; it must be a slow news day to devote a whole article to one type of carrot.

But it seems this particular variety has only recently been brought into commercial production, rescued from obscurity and allotment gardeners for the simple reason that it actually tastes of carrot. Apparently it use to be the UK's number one carrot but dies out due to its general poor health and the need for twice as much land in which to grow it. They like room to breathe apparently.

Yields and profit dominate veg production and the humble carrot is no exception; but restaurateurs and now supermarket shoppers are discovering that Chantenay carrots simply taste great. They might not look as good as those straight and perfect specimens but by heck they taste good.