My dad always enjoyed plain boiled red beets as a side dish at dinner. He was diabetic for many years, and beets were one of the few sweet pleasures in life that he was not forced to forgo. Until I started cooking red beets for myself, I was unaware of quite how much redness they actually produce. Pickled beets and canned beets you pick up at the store have lost most of their stain producing capacity. But boil some raw beets at home and you might as well dye a king size set of white sheets while you are at it. The idea may briefly cross your mind as you pour out what looks like a vat of fuchsia-red dye. Even if you have no inclination to start an all natural fabric dye cottage industry from home, you can still enjoy the sweetness of beets. Beets combined with garlic and rosemary and chicken broth form the basis of a great pasta dish, which I have adapted from the one given by Laurie Colwin in her amazing and delicious book, Home Cooking. I am not fond of angel hair pasta, so I used macaroni, and instead of Parmesan, I tried feta cheese crumbled on top. Both are delicious. There is one thing, however, that no one likes to mention about beets. I am going to mention it, mainly because some of you may never have had fresh beets before and are unaware of their amazing reddening power. So I will warn you: when you go to the bathroom after eating fresh beets, don’t panic. You are not bleeding internally. There is nothing wrong with you. Everything, and I mean everything, will come out startlingly red and pink for a little while, and that’s okay. It’s a small price to pay for sweet, delicious beets. Beets...

Le sigh. I wanted to love HAPPY FEET 2. I truly enjoyed the first one, and this sequel pretty much had me at baby penguins singing “Mama Said Knock You Out.” However, three things derailed that enjoyment: 1) The super-violent Warner Bros. Sylvester and Tweety short that ran before the movie. It made me realize how much better children’s TV is now and that I should always pay attention to the MPA ratings. I assumed that because HF2 is a movie about dancing, singing penguins, it would be rated G. But when I checked the parental rating afterwards, there was a PG staring right back at me. 2) Our daughter literally walked out after the first 30 minutes. She loved the last Winnie the Pooh movie, but after the “new experience” mesmerization wore off during HF2, she was like, “Okay, I’m out of here,” and headed for the door. CH chased after her, and texted me outside the movie to stay and finish watching it with my MIL, since we’d paid for the tickets. She was refusing to come back in and he was going to take her to the park. 3) There’s nothing here for girls. I watched the original HAPPY FEET before I had a child. That movie had one main POV, and was pretty much a Hero’s Journey story, so I barely even noticed the lack of female perspective. However, this time, the movie spreads into an ensemble story and we get many main POVs — none of which are the girls. In HAPPY FEET 2 the women are there to be desired by the male penguins and to nurture the male and boy penguins. Seriously, the Gloria character gets one solo song for pure entertainment, and then she spends the rest of...

I’m kind of fearless about picking up and starting over. My favorite thing to say is, “I can’t wait to get hurt again.”...