Bright Colors in My New Year's Resolution and Cooking Beets

You look like a Christmas ornament!

A few weeks ago, someone said this to me and I thought it was funny! This is what I was wearing-what do you think?
I just love bright colors! I used to dress this way all the time, but I have noticed that my clothes this year have been more boring, I guess you could say, than usual. Partly this is due to the fact that some of my funkier clothes no longer fit and I do not have the money to buy the kinds of clothes I would like. Most of my clothes now are basics from Target, so it is a good thing that their clothes come in a lot of bright colors! Still, I slowly came to realize that I had gotten lazy in my dressing. It's not that I did not look good, but that I did not look like ME. I was wearing a lot of dark turtlenecks and sweaters, which certainly give me an adult look, but it is unfortunately, a look that I do not particularly like for the most part. I was beginning to feel boring and old. I missed the old, fabulously quirky me, but I thought I needed money to find her again. I also thought that maybe her look was too young and I needed my look to grow-up. In a way, that's true. Wearing things like cartoon shirts-a previous staple to my wardrobe-are probably permanently out, but wearing clothes that are fun should be "in" at any age! What sparked me putting on this outfit was that I listened to a podcast on the way home from Christmas vacation and I was inspired! Towards the end of the podcast, fat acceptance activists Leslie Kinzel and Marianne Kirby talked about how much better they feel when they are dressing in a way that they feel expresses who they are-that they feel more fully like themselves. They also talked about their love of tights! This spoke to me-I used to love dressing to express myself, which means fun, quirky, and lots of bright colors. I also love tights and own quite a large collection of them and I thought to myself, "This is ridiculous! I don't need more money to dress like myself-I just need some creativity!" I then made my new year's resolution-that this year I will put more thought into how I dress and that with each outfit-unless, of course, I'm not feeling well-I will more fully represent myself. This means more tights! I had not worn the tights in that picture in a long time and I just love them-if you look closely, you'll notice that the colors of the tights are different on each leg. How fun! That day that I dressed up in those tights I got a lot of compliments and attention and I loved it. I felt like the old me. Hopefully the old me will be around for a while!

And speaking of things looking like colorful, Christmas ornaments, aren't these beets beautiful?!

I think skinned beets are gorgeous and I never knew about their beauty until I started cooking with the real deal and not the canned ones. I got these beets at a farmer's market way back in October. Here's a tip: If you see beets at a farmer's market, buy them! They are so much cheaper there than at the grocery store.

They're even more beautiful, once you start slicing them up! Look at those shiny rings!

I used these beets in a recipe for citrus-ginger roasted beets and carrots. I chose the recipe, because it uses grapefruit juice. I already had some in the fridge and I wanted to see how grapefruit juice goes with vegetables. It turns out they go together really well!

Ingredients
4 beets, peeled and sliced
3 large carrots, peeled and quartered
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/3 cup fresh pink grapefruit juice
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon olive oil

Directions
1.Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2.Set aside 1/2 cup each of the beets and carrots for the dressing. Place the remaining beets and carrots in a 9x13 inch baking dish, drizzle with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, sprinkle with the sea salt, and toss to coat. cover the dish with aluminum foil.
3.Bake the vegetables in the preheated oven for 15 minutes.
4.Meanwhile, place the reserved beets and carrots into a blender. Add the grapefruit juice, lemon juice, vinegar, honey, ginger, soy sauce, and remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Blend until smooth. After the vegetables have roasted for 15 minutes, stir in the citrus sauce, then recover, and continue cooking until the vegetables are tender, about 45 minutes more.

These carrots and beets were great! They were slightly tangy and sweet and I was told to make them again. From one unlikely Christmas ornament to another: "You are one tasty dish!"