The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, and their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.”  –Tom Robbins, “Jitterbug Perfume”

Beets dye clothing in high Vietnamese mountain villages, they help clean and heal your liver, they can be sweet and syrupy or tangy and toothsome…beets are the true magical fruit – well, vegetable, really. We do ours up in style with watermelon radishes and peppery watercress. Feast your eyes, feast your liver . . . on this most serious of salads:  Colorado Goat Cheese + Beet at the one and only T.C.O.

You know you want it.