Also: I made pickled beets last night, as part of my ongoing "eat more veggies/eat fewer sweets and fats" thing. They were gooooooooood. It's surprising how much better homemade pickled beets (even using canned beets) are than the kind you buy at the store.

Here's the recipe my mom uses - it's modified from an old edition of The Joy Of Cooking.

You take a can (like a 15 ounce can) of sliced beets. Drain them but save the liquid. Take half the liquid (I used 1/2 cup which was slightly more than 1/2). Put this in a saucepan and add

1/2 cup vinegar (I used red-wine vinegar*)
2 T sugar
3 peppercorns
2 whole cloves (I didn't have whole cloves, so I used 1/8 t ground cloves and that worked)
1/4 of a bay leaf
however much finely diced onion you want (I used about half of a smallish sweet onion and that was good).
1/2 t salt (you might be able to omit that - I think canned beets can be already kind of salty).

Boil that up gently to blend the flavors. Put the sliced beets in a glass jar (or a glazed ceramic vessel; don't use metal) and pour the liquid over them. Then you refrigerate them.

They keep a while but not "forever" - I'd use these within a month.

(*Perhaps the secret to homemade being better than that store's is that I used better quality ingredients.)

You can also put peeled hardboiled eggs in there. (For the full Upper-Midwest sensory experience**). I put a boiled egg in last night, I'm going to try it at lunch to see what it's like. (I was always afraid of them when I was a kid - they were such a weird color - and I also didn't like vinegary things when I was a kid).

It's sort of funny - I hated sour things when I was a kid but I sort of crave them now. And I still don't like cucumber pickles, but I like just about every other kind of pickled vegetable - beets, cabbage, dilled green beans, baby corn, okra....

(**Ideally then you would serve them on a "salad bar" that also boasted pickled mushrooms, gelatine salad [with mini marshmallows in it], "herring snacks," and that funny salad that all my relatives make with ring macaroni and little canned peas and those tiny shrimp. Hah...I can almost smell the breeze coming off of Little Bay de Noc when I think of those different foods....)