My beet soup fed us for a couple of days and even Bug ate some, which is a great endorsement.  I can’t convince him to eat whole beets, even though he’s a pretty good vegetable-eater.  I used to think that beets grew pickled in a jar when I was growing up, like the pickled and jarred eggs and cocktail weiners that used to sit on the bars in taverns, waiting for greasy-fingered drunks to open the lids and root around inside.  As much as I love fresh beets, they are an acquired taste.  Pickled eggs and weiners are just gross.

Nevertheless, the soup wouldn’t have been a success without the garlic.  Three big purple-skinned cloves of Ontario garlic went into that pot and it was glorious.

Like so many people these days we don’t just pay attention to what we eat but how long the food took to get to our kitchen table.  Someone once told me that I should only eat food that remembers where it came from.  If it grew long, green and tall on the stalk, then it should still resemble as much of its original attributes when it hits the plate.   With that in mind, we buy local Ontario produce if at all possible and lately it’s been from the guy who parks his truck in the lot beside Maple Dale Cheese on Highway 37, between Belleville and Toad Hall.  I know he has a name and I will ask him what it is next time.  He grows a lot of the produce he sells including the garlic, but he sells beets, zucchini, carrots, asparagus and other produce from local farmers too.  Sure it’s not cheap – each garlic clove is $2.00 but is that what we consider expensive? I think not when we think about the alternatives. The local mega-mart will sell you three cloves of Chinese garlic, each perfectly uniform in size and colour with a handy net-like thing that keeps them sitting nicely in a row for your viewing pleasure, all for the price of less than one locally grown Stinking Rose.  But it’s got no flavour and the cloves dry up so quickly after being split that you wonder how long it took for that little bulb to get to your kitchen.  For years our local garlic crops had been systematically undersold by cheaper produce from halfway around the world.  That’s too far away and we know, because we’ve been to China and we weren’t very fresh after 15 hours of flying, let me tell you.  Thankfully, things are looking up for Ontario garlic farmers.