Salad Ending In Bread & Murderous Vegetables

1 can beets

1 can mandarin oranges (or fresh clementines)

1 package leafy greens (I prefer mesclun)

1 package goats cheese

Coupla ounces of poppy dressing

Some sliced almonds

So I've always been oddly fascinated by beets. The color, the smell, they way they always dyed my grandmother's hands when she boiled them and how she stained my mother's dish clothes. One of my favorite authors, Tom Robbins, wrote a lot about beets. In Jitterbug Perfume he wrote: "A tale that begins with a beet will surely end with the devil." Well this tale will just end with you being seduced by the canned foods isle.

I was meeting my friend to eat at her apartment. For this meal she just went to Wholefoods on Houston to buy the ingredients, and I was only required to purchase the wine. So I think the key to making canned foods work is to pair them with more expensive ingredients. The beets cost no more than $2.00 and I think the mandarin oranges where $0.89. The poppy dressing ended up being mandarin poppy dressing, and the only crumbled goats cheese Wholefoods had was basil-onion flavored, which ended up being perfect, 'cause the sweet dressing needed some salt to balance it.

All in all it was delicious, but a coupla hours later I was still hungry and found myself drinkin a beer and eating pizza and pasta on a rooftop with a ballerina.

So I don't have a picture this time either (I'm really gonna get on that!), but here's something to get your blood pumping.

"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