Beets

Earthy-sweet flavor, a color palette ranging from deepest burgundy to white, and a bonus of leafy greens make an unbeatable combination: beets. While vitamin A-rich beet leaves are quite good in salads or wilted in hot olive oil, it's the fiber-rich roots that cooks appreciate most.In French bistro and country cuisine, beets pickled with onions are a popular accompaniment to sausages and other meats, and often appear on platters of crudites.In Eastern Europe and Russia, red beets are the main ingredient in what amounts to a beloved national dish: a robust soup known as borscht, which is always served with sour cream.

Nothing is simple at Michaelangelo, the restaurant where Scirocco Mediterranean Grill used to be; and for the most part that's fine.From the Mediterranean decor to the food on your plate, a lot is happening here. That's not surprising, I suppose, when the cuisine is a combination of Northern Italian, French, Spanish and American.A steak isn't just a steak. It's a charred filet mignon with herbed potato salad, bacon, scallions and "a natural sauce." But it sounds pretty good, doesn't it?The only soup regularly on the menu is a puree of cranberry bean with "crispy" prosciutto.

It only seems perfect.The fruits and vegetables so unblemished they might be cast in wax. The free samples of farmer cheese, sweet red pepper pesto and pink vodka sauce arrayed just so with a basket of Crostini Tuscan Crackers. The floor shining like a dinner plate in the bright, airy market. The staff ever helpful and mellow - an Up With People cast on chamomile.The real and the ideal might appear to converge at Fresh Fields market in Mount Washington. Look closer, though. There's trouble in paradise.

Tell Marc Cassel you don't like beets, and you'll end up eating your words. That's what happened to the staff at Dallas' Green Room restaurant, where he is executive chef."

By September, I'm starting to long for colorful foliage, brisk breezes, a rich hot stew.But the reality of life in Baltimore -- and in much of the country, for that matter -- is that summer's heat generally lingers well into the fall. So I bridge the seasons with main-course salads -- not leafy little summer salads, but something more hearty -- a mix, say, of grains, beans and nuts, garnished with crisp fresh vegetables.Either of the salads featured here, particularly when paired with a hearty whole-grain quick bread, makes a meal ideal for September's warm evenings while still offering a nod toward the bolder appetites of autumn.

Once humble cottage fare, root vegetables are suddenly climbing out of the cellar and into haute cuisine.Onions, garlic, parsnips, turnips, carrots, taro, shallots, sweet potatoes -- those are just some of the "underground" vegetables trendy chefs are using to sauce a fish, create old-fashioned French-style dishes without the butter and cream, and spark favorite foods with extra flavor."

FOR AN 8-YEAR-OLD child in east Baltimore some 76 years ago, the season of joy, good cheer and good will was not Christmas, but July.We looked forward weeks ahead to our trip down the bay. The family prepared happily for the big event. My mother took me and my sister, a toddler of 3, to the early sales to shop for summer clothes. A white, blue-trimmed sailor's uniform puffed me with pride because my father had worn a sailor's uniform for four years as a coal-passer on the battleship Pennsylvania, flagship of Fightin' Bob Evans' Great White Fleet.

When you're looking for interesting ways to cook vegetables, think roasting. You'll have tasteful company. Oven-roasted vegetables are turning up on many restaurant menus and in cookbooks that dote on veggies."

Just mentioning peanut butter cream pie can conjure up a big fat guilt trip. To shorten the ride, think about a bowl of Ukrainian borscht.From Westminster, O. Hargraves asked for the pie recipe. And the borscht was the request of Charles E. Hopwood III of Baltimore, who wrote that he wanted a "Ukrainian borscht similar to the one I had in the Russian restaurant Moscow Night before it closed. It was a wonderful garnet-colored thin beet soup that was spiced and served with a big dollop of sour cream in the center.

At the Maryland Institute, it's vroom, vroom, VA-ROOOOMMM all over the place.It's "Kustom Kulture," the world of the California car culture, of JTC hot rods, custom cars and the cartoon-inspired art they engendered. And this exhibit has everything from paintings to five real cars.In the post-World War II era, California became the hotbed of a hot-rod and customizing culture that swept the imagination of much of the younger generation. Hot rodding was more involved with souping up car engines; customizing was more about altering and decorating the car's body.

Autumn is my favorite time of year. I love the changing leaves, the cool temperatures, decorating with pumpkins and having a wide variety of vegetables in season. Root vegetables like squash, rutabagas, turnips, carrots, sweet potatoes and beets are all at their peak now. They not only are plentiful, but are powerhouses of nutrients. Take beets, for instance. They are loaded with iron, potassium, calcium and zinc. I know beets don't make it on most lists of favorite foods, but I grew up eating them.

Food 2.0: Secrets From the Chef Who Fed Google By Charlie Ayers DK Publishing / $25 / 2008 Along with the many perks offered employees of the juggernaut that is Google, you've probably heard about the fantastic food - healthful, plentiful and free - that's offered at the search engine's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The theory: Engineers will be less likely to take time to leave campus for lunch and more full of brain power to boost Google's billions. Charlie Ayers was the chef who started it all, signing on when Google had fewer than 100 employees.

If you want to go natural when dyeing eggs this Easter, browse your refrigerator and spice cabinet for dyes from plants. That's how peasants in medieval Europe used to color eggs. Simmer the spices or plant matter in water until you have a strong color; then add a couple of tablespoons of vinegar and clean, hard-boiled eggs. It may take several hours of soaking in the refrigerator to get a satisfying color, and tints still will tend to be pastel. For deeper tints, you can simmer the eggs in the dye solution, but don't plan to eat those eggs.

In St. Petersburg, Russia, on a late November day, it gets dark quite early. I'd entered the State Hermitage Museum's staggeringly vast art collection (4 million artifacts! 20,000 paintings!) in sunshine, but when I emerged at 4 p.m., it was night. Trudging forth, through the gray snow, I felt nearly as weary as Napoleon, dragging himself back to Paris from Russia in defeat. Feeling peckish, I decided on a simple bowl of borscht. Little did I realize, however, that there's nothing simple about this most Russian of soups.

There are two ingredients that should never be mentioned in the same sentence, let alone appear on the same plate. Those would be chocolate and beets. Give the new True in the Admiral Fell Inn credit. The kitchen produces a chocolate volcano dessert with a molten chocolate center surrounded with julienned beets and almost pulls it off. The restaurant's name is precious, the prices are steep and some of the food is way over the top, but True manages to be endearing in spite of itself. Restraint is not part of the equation.

Kosher candy for Hanukkah Remember the heroes of Hanukkah with a whimsical treat developed by a local entrepreneur. Maccabeans are kosher jelly beans named for the Maccabees, who defeated the Greeks and reclaimed the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 165 B.C. The product is the brainchild of Susan Sklar of Reisterstown, who says she got the idea several years ago when her then 2-year-old son came home from day care and said he had eaten Maccabeans....

If you would like to impress your friends with a four-star dinner but have the culinary skills of a short-order cook, the Culinary Institute of America has a cookbook for you. One of the nation's premier cooking schools, the Hyde Park, N.Y., institution knows a thing or two about teaching people how to get around in the kitchen. In this book, The Culinary Institute of America: Gourmet Meals in Minutes (Lebhar-Friedman, 2004, $40), the emphasis is on making impressive dishes in less than an hour, usually with ingredients you can find in any grocery store.

No time to cook dinner? Try abendbrot. This is the German custom of eating the biggest meal in the middle of the day and only a light meal of soup, salads, breads and cheeses in the evening. Abendbrot means evening bread and Germans traditionally serve the evening meal between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. A spring beet salad served along with a hearty whole-grain bread and slice of ham is an easy way to give abendbrot a try. To make the salad, place 2 cups tightly packed and chopped fresh watercress in a bowl.

In a few weeks, Baltimore will be treated to sights and sounds of Russia as the city celebrates the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg. Area restaurants will be joining in the Vivat! (Long Live) St. Petersburg festivities with Russian-inspired food and drinks. But if you'd like to pay homage to authentic Russian food in your own kitchen, I would recommend Catherine Cheremeteff Jones' A Year of Russian Feasts (Jellyroll Press, 2002, $16.95). Jones, an American who is a descended from Russian royalty, knows the difference between what Russians eat and what Westerners think Russians eat. So don't look for Chicken Kiev or Beef Stroganoff or Charlotte Russe recipes in this book.

Irwin Goldman is the country's leading authority on the table beet. To be precise, he's the only authority. When I left Goldman, a beet breeder at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a message asking if he might talk, he returned the call immediately and cried, "I'd love to! There aren't enough people who want to talk about beets!" Table beets, it seems, aren't much grown commercially anywhere in America. While the United States devotes a staggering 1.4 million acres to growing a cousin of theirs, sugar beets, big tough plants fit only for sugar extraction and livestock fodder, Goldman estimates that we grow fewer than 8,000 acres of table beets, more than half of these in Wisconsin.