Category: Parenting

So, you find yourself staring at a bunch of beets, wondering what on earth to do with them. Fear not, dear reader, for I am here to guide you through the wardrobe-staining experience of baking beets whole – a culinary adventure.

Selecting and Cleaning the Beets

First things first, let’s pick the perfect beets. You want them to be firm, smooth, and as perky as THOT. Look for ones with their greens still intact, a sign of freshness and vitality. Anything looking sad and droopy should be left on the shelf – we want beets that don’t look beaten. Isn’t that the kind of irony we expect from the world?  Trim off those leafy greens, leaving just a little bit of stem to keep the beets from getting too bleedy during their time in the oven.

Or, have you purchased a greenless 20lb bag of beets so small that peeling them seems like the kind of punishment outlawed in some countries? But they’re yours now, Sista!

Once you’ve found your beets, it’s time to give them a good rinse and scrub under cold water. Count, if you can, how many times you disassociate throughout this monotonous task and repeatedly return to find yourself still scrubbing the damned things. (They’re not looking like such a show-stopping deal anymore, are they?)

I digress.

But here’s the thing: the torture ends here. Because you’re going to bake your beets whole, you can skip the agony of peeling! Take this tiny win and throw your beets into a baking dish deep enough to catch potential drips.

Baking Beets Whole

Now, let’s get roasting! Preheat your oven to 375°F (190°C).

If you’ve got a few big, beautiful beets, you might consider wrapping each one in foil like a potato to seal in the moisture as it cooks. If your beets are small, you’ll want to wrap your baking dish in foil to seal all the beets at once. If you want to add a little flavour early in the process, you can dress them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper before wrapping them up. Adding 1 cup of water to the sealed baking dish will help steam the peels and make them easier to remove later.

Bake your beets whole on the middle rack for 45 minutes to an hour and increase time as needed. You’ll know your beets are done when you can slide a knife into them easily. Remove them from the oven and remove the aluminum foil to cool.

Peeling Your Whole Baked Beets

The following should be done with an apron and latex gloves if you’re clumsy and slightly careless, like yours truly. Otherwise, you could emerge from the kitchen looking like you just brutalized someone – but pinker.

Once you can comfortably touch your beets, you can start sliding their skins off with ease. It’s faster and easier than peeling them raw – and you get to keep all your knuckles!

Your beets are now cooked and ready to be used in a soup, salad or pickling brine. And while you could eat your baked beets whole, we recommend slicing them to your preference, depending on the application.

Dressing the Baked Beets Whole

Your beets can be dressed in so many delicious ways! Our favorite is:

• Olive oil (good quality if you can)
• Salt
• Pepper
• Balsamic vinegar
• Spring lettuce mix
• Fresh chopped parsley, dill, basil and chives
• Crumbed feta or soft goat cheese

These are ingredients that can be eyeballed and adjusted to taste. Need more beet salad recommendations? Check out this awesome beet salad dressing blog by the Happy Muncher.

Was it worth it?

Of all the root vegetables in the garden, beets have to be my favorite (with carrots trailing them closely). They are so many varieties to grow and ways to prepare them – and I haven’t yet tried one I didn’t like. There is something so comforting about their sweetness and their beauty that I could easily eat them every day. And I’ll probably have to, because I bought too many beets.

When I started gardening, it all seemed fairly simple. Bury the seed, grow the seed, store the winnings. But it quickly became evident that the winnings I was accruing were being produced in numbers that my freezer just could not accommodate. Green beans, peas, carrots, and dozens of other crops were ready in the garden. Without another freezer and without a cold storage area, I was really going to miss out on sustained enjoyment. And that was the point of all this effort in the first place – food security! All at once I realized that I would need to have a future in canning if I wanted to make this work. But canning jars, lids, and ‘debubbling’ were all so foreign to me. Finally, I went on Marketplace and bought what seemed like a garage full of canning supplies from an older lady who was scaling back, and began the process of making mistakes, learning, and doing it all again. Here are three things I wish I knew when I started learning about canning meat and produce.

1: Used Lids Are Too Risky

When I bought boxes full of canning jars, lids and rings, I thought I was all set! The result was losing several jars to a poor seal. What I learned is that while it is perfectly fine to reuse rings and canning jars, lids (the flat top to your jar), and rings should be new. The reason is that the ring relies on achieving a seal between the glass and the rubber that lines the underside of the ring. After being used, or after being stored for too long, the rubber on the lid can dry out and become too rigid to hold a perfect seal. This results in much cussing from yours truly – after hours of canning work this is disappointment that I cannot bear and you shouldn’t either. If you’re new, buy new lids unless you have a seasoned canner in your life who can check them and advise. If your lid doesn’t seal, it will pop up and down when you press on it and, eventually, you will see signs of mold or other signs of spoilage on the food itself. If you don’t have a good seal on a jar – put it in the fridge to be used right away. Do not put this jar into storage, because the spoilage is a risk to anyone who eats it. And no one wants to die of a pickled beet.

2: You Can’t Water-Bath Everything

When I was young, I’d watch my grandmother water bath apple juice after picking the absolute abundance of apples in her modest yard. The process looked fairly simple, though there were lots of opportunities to burn myself so my involvement was limited to peeling apples. If I had been older, I’d have asked more questions and found out that, while you can water bath many things, you can’t water bath just as many – and it all comes down to the acidity of the item you’re canning and how much it needs to be cooked.

What is water-bath canning?

Water bath canning means that the sterile jars are packed with produce and then immersed in boiling water to process. This process is preferable (in my opinion) to pressure canning because you don’t need to mess with a pressure canner, weights, etc. Fruits and vegetables often have enough acidic properties (4.6 or below) to effectively kill bacteria in a water bath. Some things, like tomatoes, may need some added acid in the form of lemon juice, vinegar or citric acid before being water-bathed.

3: You’ll Need Some Hardware (canning jars, lids, seals…)

Anyone who tells you it’s cheap to get started with gardening and canning hasn’t purchased a pressure cooker, large stock pot, or the propane to run the show. While these are one-time expenses, it’s important to be aware of what you’ll need to ensure that you’ll have everything ready when you are. Remember, you’re saving a ton of money at the grocery store by canning your own meat and produce and you’ll be able to use it again and again. At minimum you’ll need:

• A canning funnel
• A stainless ladle (choose one that will be well-proportioned to the funnel you’re using)
• A magnetic jar lifter (get one that’s rubberized to reduce slips)
• A large stock pot or pressure cooker
• A guide to canning times etc. (Ball makes a good one) or see this video of best canning and preserving books!

Embarking on a journey to master the use of canning jars, lids, and rings, can seem intimidating but it is a simpler process that you’ve likely conjured in your head. The real challenge is the time it takes to complete! Regardless, I’ve come to love canning and look forward to seeing all my jars neatly lined up in the pantry. It’s pretty, it’s easy to identify, and it is ready when you are – no thawing required!

To the tune of: Learn to Swim – Tool

As a thirty-something wife, mother and business owner who isn’t as comfortable with conflict as I’d like to be, I typically abstain from these conversations. I prefer, instead, to hold my tongue until I can get home and throw up on myself. Today, though, things are different.

Last night, my husband came home to find me agitated and expressing my concerns about the political state of a country that has been our home all our lives, a discussion we have had together many times before. The tension around this issue has been rife in my household as it seems that anytime we venture out into public we come home more disillusioned than before. This time, however, my husband didn’t respond to my concerns about the direction that our country is headed in. I talked and he listened, and listened, and listened. But there was no conversation to be had.

There was no conversation to be had, not because he didn’t hear me, not because he didn’t agree, but because he is so tired of being chronically angry at being continuously put down everywhere he looks that he simply told me: “I cannot continue to call-out the wrongdoings of our current cultural situation and still maintain my mental health”.

Let that sink in for a minute.

This beautiful, intelligent, pillar of masculine perfection who served our country for 6 years before settling into civilian life where he works arguably as hard for me and our two boys (and who, BTW, has never been anything but gentle to me), said to me in our kitchen that he just couldn’t any more. My husband is shutting down.

There is no excuse for this kind of mass manipulation of public sentiment against men in a country as educated and democratic as ours. Simply no excuse.

I woke up today to this horrifying new ad by Gillette. Did it show up on my feed because people were outraged? No. Just like always, this vile rhetoric was being celebrated online by so many of my friends, family and colleagues. Women who I have come to respect, mothers raising young boys, all taking time to celebrate this disgusting advertisement for the lie of benevolence it purports to be.

Saying No Thank You to Malevolence

I’m not entertaining this bullshit anymore. Allowing this garbage to continue and saying nothing is tantamount to allowing my children to be malevolently abused by a communist media whose agenda it is to expose men to psychological torment for political gain.

It hearkens back to the ‘good old days’. You know, the not-so-good ones wherein a fascist dictator nearly overtook the entirety of Europe by playing on and inflating the sense of victimhood of his compatriots. The axe that forced a wedge between the Jewish community and the rest of German society. We know better.

Well, we could know better if it wasn’t for identity politics and the communist brainwashing that we’re all forced to hear incessantly from that Trudeau thing. Trudeau would castrate our men himself, if only he had the time. Amidst constant assaults on our ability to sustain our province (and hello! consequently our country), this prime minister has done an incredible job of confusing the issues that first wave feminists worked so hard to achieve – and playing on the legacy resentments of women. What it has turned out is a loud minority of women so consumed by their resentment and victimhood as to justify the institutional dehumanization of men.

I see this widespread degradation as such a horrendous act of intolerance that I can hardly understand how these women manage to overlook the hypocrisy of their position. Hint: if your ideology requires you to demonize and denigrate an entire gender, it’s likely that you’re acting more out of victimhood (regression) than of ‘progressivism’.

No Boys Allowed (unless we have heavy lifting to do…)

We are raising boys in a climate in which they are no longer welcome. Regardless of whether my husband or my children have acted unjustly toward another citizen, they have been (and will be) characterized as if they did. Because we don’t want little boys anymore, and we don’t want men, either. The only safe place to exist in this ‘new’ Canada is in some obscure genderless corner of the LGBTQMNOP community – but if you’re a white male conservative?? Fuhgeddaboudit with a capital FU. This is the overt action of intolerance espoused by the very people who say that they are fighting intolerance. These people would make excellent Catholic priests. (No – it’s okay for me to say this. At least you’d think it’s okay for me to say with the way we have cut Christian words like ‘Christmas’ out of polite vernacular).

This is the same petty rationale used by women to exercise extreme manipulation of their children throughout divorce proceedings just to get a jab-in at Daddo, and the same one used by Trudeau to invoke this concept of ‘wrong speak’. We call-in the government like Big Daddy every time someone is mean to us, and now Big Daddy-Brother is here to stay.

With the torrent of censorship befalling our intellectual institutions, early education programs and infiltrating our communities, it’s a wonder we can even communicate at all. I have now stopped consuming anything that refers to ‘the patriarchy’ or feminism in any way. I don’t ‘do’ victimhood and I don’t do ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘micro aggressions’. We have lost the ability to talk about people, without talking about the groups in which they belong – without regard to whether it’s right or wrong to make such unbelievable claims. When the rights of the group overtake the right for people to exist individually and to be held individually responsible for their actions and behaviours, we are on the wrong track, friends.

We have become so fucking entitled to our first-world rights, so complacent, that we have now made it okay for the Government to act to regulate, not just our economic infrastructure, but to live in our homes, schools and bedrooms as invited guests to help us decide what kind of person is allowed to exist and how they’re allowed to speak.

Our men have been fighting our wars since the beginning of time, and they have been spiritually and psychologically dismantled as a result of that – many times the result of a UN whim. Yet, instead of thanks, we are demonstrative in our hostility against men at every opportunity.

For as many people that think that talking about a gender this way is okay, it’s a wonder they think they’re safe at all. Call me crazy, but if all men are toxic sociopaths as the left would have you believe – I don’t think that denigrating them in public, in media and in social forums would be the best way to overcome that concern.

Let’s Fight About Equality, Shall We?

We are so in love with our victimhood stories that we seem to actually think that it’s okay to have a government and a societal agenda that is intent on widening the divide between men and women and that this is helpful. I can’t think of a more counterproductive agenda.

Around this time in the article is where I’m supposed to start explaining myself, telling others how ‘I’ve been victimized too’ and how ‘I really am a good feminist’, and I’m not going to do any of that. It doesn’t matter where I come from or how I was raised, wrong is wrong.

We didn’t become ‘the west’ by scapegoating masses of our society and throwing stones at them in advance of their crimes. Consideration for the TRUE value of diversity – diversity of language, thought, perspective and art– is fast being lost. We’ve got ourselves into such a hysterical tantrum that we are comfortable perpetuating this incredibly harmful rhetoric while our fathers, uncles, grandparents and sons become increasingly marginalized and scapegoated for communist social gain.

And if you don’t think it’s communist – think again. A reread of 1984 might do us all some good. Or maybe we could all read such incredible depictions of the horrors of scapegoating and tyranny brought to us courtesy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works. But we won’t do that – we can’t stomach it. For us, showing up to shit on masculinity is, at its very core, reasonable – and we don’t have to take responsibility for the damage that it does to ALL of us. It doesn’t take a wizard to know that these kinds of tactics do nothing to move us forward. It’s the energetic equivalent of indiscriminate terrorism, or of cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Breaking Up

I’ve lost many friends in the last few years to an intentional distancing in which I could no longer be around these disgusting conversations. Masculinity being called toxic – what a terrible implication! If we were to call Feminism out for its toxicity there would be an outcry in the streets the likes of which we have never seen. And for a supposed redneck city, Edmonton sure has its leftist politics scattered in every corner of the map. I’d move – but what if it’s worse on the other side of the border? Can Californians still have conversations about conservative notions without risking being labeled transphobic or fascist? I think not. I’ll tell you who’s fascist, Knights of the Leftist Kingdom, and it ain’t me!

I’m ready to lose more friends if I need to, too. Every time I see another friend advocating for censorship of a group or an idea, I take four giant. steps. back. It is my responsibility as a Canadian to distinguish the innocuous from the criminal, in Janice Fiamenco’s words. To call out injustice where there is criminal harm, and to protect the innocent men of my family against the zombie-like totalitarianism of the far left by speaking up for them when I see blanket accusations and harm being done in the name of righteous self-indulgence. Maybe these hateful feminists should practice hearing the other side, practice being offended and growing a back bone – after all y’all offend me every day.

Maybe we could start by modeling to our daughters that indiscriminate labeling of a gender is no more help than blaming every member of the western ‘white’ for the atrocities committed against our first nations communities long before our time. Maybe we could show more love for the incredible currents of strength residing in the men that we love and stop maiming the many for the deeds of the few.

What does the goal of self-loathing in men really accomplish besides lighting the fire of hatred under their feet? Then again, maybe I’m wrong– maybe the real goal isn’t about men at all. Maybe it’s just part of the globalization of communism – the intended proliferation of governments like communist China and Cuba, whom our Prime Minister is so oft to compliment and idealize.

So goodbye to Gillette razors, you won’t be seen in my house anymore after today. And I fully expect to have to educate and re-educate my boys in the social sciences as they age from home, where the communist angle can be squashed around the dinner table like the cockroach that it is. If we truly love our rights and first-world freedoms, we had better start behaving in a way that allows us to maintain them – because right now we are handing over every ounce of our power to stand confidently and autonomously in our Canada – to a man with an agenda who wants to tell you how to speak, how to live and how to earn a living.

If we do nothing about this continuous assault on our freedoms to speak openly about issues that concern us and continue with this petty nonsense, then so-be-it. I’ll see you in the labour camps. Or, we could learn to swim.