Hi.  My name is Mark and this is my cooking blog.

I get asked a lot for my recipes, so I decided to start this cooking blog.  What you’ll find here will be my recipes and my variations on others’ recipes, my cooking tips and who knows what else. 

I should say up front that I’m lactose intolerant (check out my lactose intolerance site www.nowhey.org) and I also try to live a low-carb lifestyle.  So the recipes you’ll find here will generally be devoid of milk and milk products and try, wherever possible, to be low in carbs.

I hope you enjoy the site and the recipes.

Mark

I was at a party and along with the usual carrot, celery and jicama sticks there were these interesting looking purple/red sticks.  Some of the party-goers thought they were simply dyed jicama, but they were immediately identifiable to me as raw beet sticks.  They had a really interesting flavor, and they didn’t bleed when you held them.  Some people though they had seen them at Trader Joe’s but I decided to try and make my own.

Ingredients:
Raw beet, quantity up to you

I use pretty large beets, about the size of a baseball.  I prepare one beet at a time.   Begin by peeling the beet with a carrot/vegetable peeler.  I have a great peeler by Rösle and it just takes a minute or so to peel the entire beet.  Cut the beet into sticks.  (I probably don’t have to tell you how to do this, but I begin by cutting the beet in half.  Working with one half, flat side down, I slice the beet about 3/8″ wide.  Then I take half those slices, flip them so the flat side is down and slice again.  This will leave you with 3/8″ sticks.  Repeat with the other half.)

Once the beet is sliced, put them into a bowl of cold water and let them sit for about an hour.  Change the water and let sit for a few more hours.  You can repeat this a third time if you want.  Drain the water and put the beet sticks onto a dry paper towel and pat them as dry as possible.  Put them into a zip lock bag and keep in the fridge – they’ll be good for a week or more.

The beet will bleed a lot when you are doing the initial cutting.  You might want to wear an apron to keep the beet juice off your clothes.  I cut them on a plastic cutting board and the red juice washes right off, but I imagine it would stain a wooden board.  The juice will also stain your hands red, so you might want to wear gloves.  Personally I don’t bother as the red doesn’t last too long.  (I have read that you can neutralize the red stain on your hands with lemon juice but that hasn’t worked for me.)

Note:  If you eat a lot of these you may notice that your urine is orange or even reddish.  You may also a lot of red color with your stools.  Neither is anything to worry about.