Beet it.

Lately I've been eating a lot (a lot) of Swiss chard, either with sweet potatoes and onions or just sauteed in broth. I'm not sick of it, per se, but I feel that I should branch out to other leafy greens: Collard greens, Kale, and the like. Which leads me to the topic of beets.

As a kid, I hated the cold beet soup my mom made during the summer. It was the same shade as Pepto-Bismol and made the whole fridge smell like hard cooked eggs. Summers of Borscht fostered my early, negative association with beets, which lingered until approximately April, 2005, when I tried (and loved) pickled beets. Beyond the pickled variety, though, I know nothing about this richly-hued veggie - a knowledge void I would like to fill.

Yesterday afternoon, while bumming around the grocery store (I had to stay out of the apartment while it was being shown to a prospective renter), I almost bought a bunch of beets. "Hey," I thought, "I can eat the greens per usual, and..." And what? Roast the beets proper? I chickened out, not having a recipe in mind (and also remembering the bunch of chard I already had in the fridge). Consider this a call for beet recipes: how do you all eat your beats? Baked in the oven? Sauteed? And how do you prefer the greens? I'm going to sniff out some recipes and will report back with my results.