My kitchen was totally clean last Thursday, so naturally I decided to make something with beets, the stainy-est thing you can cook. I boiled some beets, added honey, neglected the pot and allowed the beets to boil over. After cleaning up the mess (for the most part) and letting the beets and beet water cool, I poured the beets with their water into a blender, added the juice of a lemon and almost a quart of blueberries. I strained all that to get the amazingly thick dark red juice, added champagne yeast to carbonate, left it overnight, and then found out what happens when you use a corked bottle for carbonating (rather than the screw-tops on traditional soda bottles). Here’s what happens: when the carbonation builds enough, the cork will fly off the bottle, terrifying you while you’re driving or exploding in a mess on the table as soon as you arrive the friend’s house you were diving to. Despite my complicated relationship with it, when we mixed beet blueberry soda with vodka and a splash of soda water, we got a delicious sort of Russia-inspired cocktail.
