I expect that someday we will be buying watermelons that have been bred to include the store bar code on the skin. For now, we have some interesting varieties of orange raspberries, white rhubarb, and black rice. Beets are on the cutting edge, with red, white, gold, and candy-striped. Our local farmer’s market didn’t have the candy-striped kind, no doubt a step towards the built-in bar code, so I made do with some golden beets.

Golden beet roots are naturally tinged with light green. In our market they were the same price as red beets.Both are sweet and tender, especially when young. Roots do not bleed like red beets when pickled.

Golden beets are more delicate and a little sweeter than red beets, and they don’t bleed out when cooked or pickled. that makes them good for salads, but I doubt that you could get a genuine Pole or Russian to eat yellow borscht, unless, of course, they had moved to California.

I boiled the beets and then pickled them.

Almost any firm vegetable can be pickled by putting them in a mixture of

1 cup water
1 cup cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups sugar

and storing them in the fridge. More elaborate methods involve cooking spices in the pickling brew. I’ll let Alton brown explain how to do it fancy.

There is also golden beet soup. Best not to call it borscht.