You will never forget you've eaten beets.

When passing on recipes people often add little notes or comments, "make sure you don't boil it too long as it gets bitter!" "you don't have to use cake flour!" etc. But when someone tells you that fresh beets will "make your stools look like you hemorrhaged a fetus," it gives one pause. I mean asparagus pee is one thing but...whoa. I knew beet juice could stain but is that the reason why people don't eat beets that much?? My god!

A friend once raved about a recipe for roasted beets she found on the Friday Food Files from the sfgirlbybay blog. However I don't have a grill. One day I will be a real grown up with a back yard to grill in. Or at least a fire escape big enough for a mini-webber...and then I will grill beets. So on with the searching for things to do with beets. Julia suggests making them into a salad, Molly of Orangette likes to make them into a tart with feta cheese. That was a fantastic post of hers but still not quite what I was looking for...I finally just google searched beets and lo! Roasted beets with shallots? Now that's more like it.

Of course I had to bastardize the recipe. It's what I do. It's nearly impossible for me to complete a recipe as is. I don't set out to do it, it's usually a combination of lack of supplies and just being ornery. This time the beet greens were a bit too far gone to be eaten, orange zest is silly when you don't have an orange, and I didn't have walnuts...so I ended up just buying shallots and deciding to see if it would go well over pasta instead of greens.

So there I was, alone in my kitchen on a Friday night with rubber gloves, a sharp knife and a bunch of beets. Let's do this.

Cut to ten minutes later. I'm slamming the oven door shut and surveying my kitchen. It looked like I had slaughtered tiny hot pink animals. Pink stained gloves, pink stained knife, pink stained chopping board, pink spots on my floor from dropped bits. Awesome. I was just finishing the cleanup when the beets and shallots were done roasting, and of course slicing the beets made a mess again so the mean thoughts about beets was at an all time high when it came time to taste my dinner.

I take it all back. Slaughter is fun. The clean up is worth it. Beets are delicious. Rubber gloves not actually needed.

Beets have a fantastic earthiness to them, which isn't quite like anything else out there. Paired with the slight sweetness of the shallots and the vinaigrette it's fantastic. Though perhaps a bit too sweet...less sugar next time. And penne is a good solid base to put it all on, and when it absorbs the beet juice it turns an awesome shade of pink! PINK!

Now this recipe did take a bit of time and makes an awful mess but guess what! The basic concept is easily turned into a "I'm starving and only have 10 minutes to make dinner" dish! A must have for any Twenty Something. Boil up a hand full of penne, saute up some onions/shallots in olive oil. Chop up some canned beets, add them to the onion to heat up and then serve over the penne.

So go, find some beets and revel in pink food.

But wait, about 20 minutes after you eat it you'll remember the beginning of this post. The post beet scatological horror. Oh yeah they weren't kidding. If you hadn't been given a heads up you'd be checking into the ER right about now. It only lasts about 24 hrs, let your inner 5 yr old enjoy itself.