Rootcrops part whateveritis, OXTAILS!

Woooooo, GOBAMA! <-- first major offtopic veer ever to make it on here, please recognize.

Okay, Oxtails:
Oxtails used to be cheap trash meat but it's another thing like happened with black beans: the food of the lumpen has been taken on by the elite and rendered all expensive when it shouldn't be. Ain't it always the way?

Anyway, they make a stand-up borscht! Turns out.

I was recently told not to eat them by an anonymous commenter named blang gatang or something to whom I say, "Nothing doing, Flang Orang Atang, I am eating oxtails."

All they are is the tail of the cow; it's like eating necks or something. Who among us has not eaten a neck or two? Calm down about OX TAILS, people.

You simmer them in your stock for a while and take them out before they're too cooked to death. Pick all the meat off the bone. Discard the bone, reserve the meat.

A bunch of stuff is supposed to go in borscht, but basically you'll do fine with onions and beets. I didn't have any cabbage, so I put in a head of cauliflower (weird-seeming but actually pretty innocuous) and a broccoli stalk. No way was I putting in the flowerettes: I knew that would bitterify it pretty bad. It did not turn out too bitter.

The recipe calls for one pound of shredded beets, so I shredded a pound of beets, but the thing is, why do you want obliterated beets? The whole thing is that they're so satisfying to bite into. So at the last minute I diced another pound and put them in--late enough, you know, so they wouldn't be cooked to docility.

I used the recipe from Nothing Beets Borscht! a book of slavic cookery techniques that has like three to five borscht recipes in it. I don't know why I bothered because I ignored most of the instructions. I probably shouldn't even call what I made "borscht," since it doesn't have sausage in it. Okay, so I'll call it boosch. I was going to call it "Boosh," but that's probably copyright infringement (google Frisky Dingo® + Boosh®). Anyway, I'm not going to tell you how to make borscht or boosch because it's just soup, God! But basically the basic technique with the OXTAIL! YUM! is to take the shredded cowtailmeat out of the fridge and fry it up in a lot of butter and garlic and onion and salt and add it at the last minute. Deglaze the butterfried OXTAIL pan with some of the borscht or boosch or bosch broth and add the deglazins.

Durn. I mean "deglazins" to look like "squeezins," as in "corn squeezins," a term I stole from the Simpsons. But "deglazins" doesn't look right, it looks all hifalutin. If I put in an apostrophe, it looks like a possessive, not a dropped G. I hate our language. Only Obama can use it inoffensively. He is the only one allowed to talk or write in our language from now o

Focus on root crops, Part III, not wasting beets

Not wasting beets is really hard. Beets are so hard to process.

I made garlick-ey greens out of the stocks and tops and threw them in the fridge in a glass bowl with a plate on top. I finished eating the last of these today. (Greens by themselves often seem too virtuous to deal with: if you scramble them into a lot of butter and eggs they may turn into something you actually want to eat.)

The last bunch of beets I had, the ones that didn't go into the root crop medley, those I broke down and boiled. I have some kind of ancient aversion to boiling: my belief, which may be apocryphal, is that all the goodness goes into the water, which you then throw down the drain. But beets are damn impossible, so I boiled them.

The boiled beets were really good! The skins came off in like two seconds, I cut them into wedges and threw vinegar on top and dill and ate them and they were just fine.

This latest bunch is becoming a problem. They keep a long time, but they don't keep: FOREVER. They're still in the fridge because my plan was to make borscht, but to do that I have to break out the oxtails I'm going to use for stock and I have to get into a whole thing. Meanwhile the tomatoes I bought at the market to go into the borscht are about three times as many tomatoes as I needed and they're going soft. Kitchen panic. Kitchen paniiiiic.