Red, master; red as blood

If you've never heard of Mark Bittman, you should change that fact. He does a lot of food writing, most famously for the New York Times, which is where I first encountered him. The recipes in that article (two of which I have successfully accomplished) led to what is, in fact, a much more important piece of writing: The $84 Stir-Fry. Please read that article so that you can fully understand the cooking position that I'm coming from. It will help you understand this post.

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As mentioned in previously, I had originally planned on making three dishes in one night, but didn't get to the last one until Monday. The missing piece was Sweet Beets in Puff Pastry with Crème Fraîche and Ginger, which required picking up these puppies. [Note: not actually puppies.]

I've never dealt with raw beets before, but internet consensus told me to cut off the greens and store them separately, otherwise the greens would draw all the moisture out of the roots. And since they weren't actually used in the recipe, that meant that I had all the leaves to work with.

I don't usually post non-Renaissance cooking on here, but I'm cheating since this counts as part of the meal and deals with reusing ingredients. I did a quick search on Punchfork for recipes that used beet greens but not actual beets, and this Beet Greens with Feta Pasta was just the ticket. The best part was that I only needed to pick up the onion and the penne, which made it really impressive that I somehow forgot to buy the penne. Whoops. But the pasta was delicious, and it gave me something to eat while I made dessert.

Step one, peel the beets. Apparently beets are really easy to peel if you cook them first, but that is the opposite of what the recipe calls for.

Steps two through seventeen involve grating the beets. This takes forever. And ever. And ever. This dish was quickly moving itself into the realm of "not worth it, no matter how good it is," and I hadn't even escaped ingredient prep. There has to be a better way to do this; preferably, a method that actually produces pretty, individual strands of beet instead of beet mush.

It got a little hairy at points.

Eventually, I was done. Six beets' worth of finely gratedness.

Unfortunately, by this point I had gone completely and irrevocably insane.

Kris came in at about this point, took one look around the kitchen, and announced, "I'll get a shovel and some quicklime."

Much simpler were the remaining ingredients. Kris didn't trust me to operate a grater anymore, so he found a mortar and pestle and smashed up some cinnamon. Also, apparently we own a mortar and pestle. Who knew? We also learned that, as Kris put it, a half of a half of a cinnamon stick produces about a quarter teaspoon of ground cinnamon. If only those numbers could be simplified!

Melted butter, cinnamon, honey. This is the delicious bit right here. It gets added to the beets. I combined it in one place first just because it made for a better picture.

And... you know, I'm not sure why I took this picture since the beets look exactly the same with and without the butter mixture.

After those are mixed together and set, the container gets covered wi- SONUVABITCH!

And I was out of aluminum foil at 11:40pm. This called for drastic measures.

But then I realized that I could take drastic-yet-useful measures. My building contains a 7-11, so a quick trip downstairs, a jog around back, and I am re-foiled. Two observations:
1) There's a weird sort of logic to the items placed together on the shelves.
2) I've been using Safeway store-brand aluminum foil since I moved in, and it is amazing how much thicker the real stuff is. Heavy duty, seriously.

As I was saying, the mixed ingredients get covered in foil and tossed in the oven for a while. This gives me time to prep for the end of the dish. I don't really need to measure out the crème fraîche, but there's some crystallized ginger that needs to be minced. After the beet grating, however, I am content to mini-julienne. Observe!

With that done and some time still on the clock, I can move to prepping the pastry shells. I'm kind of excited about this, since the man with the duck bursting out of his chest proclaims this stuff to be a winner of the International Fancy Food Show. Can one thing win the whole show? I kind of like the idea of the judges declaring that these pastries were better than the caviar.

I open it up, and experience total dread.

"SHENANIGANS!," I cry. Well, I may have been more explicit than that. The point is that it's just after midnight, there are four minutes left until the beets come out of the oven, and I'm feeling skeptical about 7-11 having any pastry shells. I was not prepared to deal with pastry dough.

In the meantime, the sweetened beets need to come out of the oven. The recipe tells me that I should pour out the excess liquid, and I'm a little worried that there is none. The beets weren't evenly spread out in the dish, and so some parts have cooked through a bit more than others. I thought I had burnt some of it onto the Pyrex, but it all turned out ok. In retrospect I might have used a bit more of the sweetening mixture, but that's personal taste. Well, personal taste and the fact that I always feel like actual vegetable size throws off the intended ratios in a recipe.

Back to the pastry dough. And I mean, seriously, dough? Nothing on the outside of the package suggested dough. Nothing about dough, or sheets. Just "pastry". I didn't even know this was a thing! To be fair, the word "shells" never popped up but I assumed there was no way a grocery store didn't have them and this was clearly the correct choice and anyway. I stopped caring at this point, so I grabbed the dough and ripped it into irregular pieces and shoved them into a muffin tin. Then warned Kris that the kitchen may catch on fire in the next few minutes.

The kitchen didn't catch on fire, and the pastry cooked, but they didn't exactly have "insides" in which to place the beet mixture. So there was really only one solution.

If you're a fan of Patton Oswalt, this is the dessert version of a failure pile in a sadness bowl. And this is me sitting on the floor in the corner of my kitchen, dejectedly eating a dessert meant for six people and wondering where my life went wrong.

Actually, one of my bootleg pastry puffs came out with the right shape, so I assembled one serving just to demonstrate the original intent. It was a fine looking dessert, if I may say so myself.

And the cutaway view for those of you with engineering backgrounds.

The verdict: tasty, but man what a pain. All of the flavors come together really well at the end, even if the dimensions of the pastry and my casualness with the crème fraîche caused me to under-beet and over-crème. The ginger on top is a really nice touch, and I don't think a lack of mincing really hurt me in any way. If I had a way to magically grate the beets with minimal effort, I would certainly make this dish again (especially since I have a pound of crystallized ginger that will last approximately until forever). As it stands, I will think very hard about making this recipe and then cry and eat a gallon of ice cream straight out of the container.

As an added bonus, I had one leftover beet that I roasted in the oven the next night with some olive oil, and forgive me it was delicious so sweet and so cold.

But seriously, those pastries are amazing, duck-chest-man was right to give them an award.