I ate beets for the first time in my life over the week-end and they were. . .edible. That’s saying a lot when you realize that for the first 20 years of my life I was probably never served a vegetable that didn’t come out of a can and consequently hated all vegetables with a passion.
Even as a small child I knew that hating vegetables was tantamount to sin. An old, old lady at my church came up to me on several occasions to tell me that one time she met my mother and me in the grocery store. I was about three, sitting in the shopping cart.
“What a good little girl you are!” she said.
“Yes,” I said woefully, “but I don’t like my begetables.”
My father loved canned beets. I just loved washing the dishes in that pretty pink water.
While paging through Bittman’s The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, I ran across a recipe for raw beet salad. He said: “Eaten raw, beets are delicious: even self-proclaimed beet-haters will like them in this salad.”
Hmmm. . .well, I’d always wanted to like beets, so I thought I’d give them a try. I peeled, I shredded, I tossed them with vinegar, Dijon mustard, olive oil, shallots and parsley. Surprised that I didn’t gag, I managed to eat a few forkfuls. The salad was cool, tangy and crunchy, with really only an underlying beet flavor.
I made my husband eat some and he said he hoped I didn’t make raw beet salad a habit. That’s unlikely, given that I wasn’t crazy about it, but I’m always happy when I find a new way to eat the dreaded begetables of my past.
9:27:22 AM 
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