bad metaphor

Once upon a time, I thought I did not like beets. I’d only ever had the canned kind, and I have an instinctive distrust of things that come out of cans that are that color. I think I’d probably lumped them in, unfairly, with that atrocious Thanksgiving cranberry jelly abomination – the kind that slurps out of the can, still retaining all the ridges and botulistic bumps of its container. Blergh.

Then I had real beets: roasted while still wrapped in their native clothes, drizzled with a little olive oil. Beautiful! How could I have gone through my entire life, without having realized such a simple thing. Beets = totally awesome. After this epiphany I ate nothing but beets for three days straight, pausing in alarm when I discovered that, well, that color? Yeah, that lingers post-processing.

Ahem. So my good friend Marie, of Happy Plate, is leaving for El Salvador soon, and she is a long time beet-advocate. She is even planning on getting a beet tattoo when she returns to the states! Naturally, here is my going away present to her:

A glamorous lady beet!

Since I learned that there are such things as gold beets and even candy striped beets, a new rainbow of potential knitted toys has been opened up for me. What lovelies!