I have a beet.
A single, solitary beet.
I didn’t grow this beet. (Garden apocalypse this year, remember?)
I got it in a produce box from Azure Standard. Because that’s what you do when your ground is poisoned and barren.
(Okay, okay. I’ll stop being so dramatic about it.)
Anyway.
There was a time when August meant vegetables on every flat surface of my house.
Tomatoes spilling out of bowls. Monster zucchini. Peppers and green beans and onions. Cucumbers multiplying when I wasn’t looking.
A hot kitchen, sticky counters, and entire afternoons spent managing the harvest.
But not this year.
This year, it’s just me and my beet.
And said beet has plunged me into all sorts of ruminations.
For a period of my life, my homestead grew like an out-of-control August garden.
Abundant. Expanding. Always more, more, more.
But as I’ve stripped things down—both in my life and in my garden—I’m realizing there’s something very useful about having less, even if just for a season.
When there’s less noise and excess, you get a much clearer look at what you actually like. What you actually want. And what matters enough to keep.
And what I’ve realized after the biggest shake-up of my life is that I am still the woman who cultivates and grows and preserves—regardless of who is or isn’t in my life.
It is woven into the fabric of who I am. (More thoughts on this soon…)
And I’ve also made peace with another notion:
Little things still count.
Somewhere along the way, food preservation became synonymous with volume.
Boxes of peaches. Bushels of tomatoes. Five-gallon buckets of cucumbers. Hundreds of filled jars over the course of a season.
Friend, trust me— I have done that version. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
I loved it. (Well, most of the time…) And I’ll probably do it again.
But I think all that abundance perhaps accidentally convinced me that preserving food was only worth it when I had monster quantities.
But the little amounts count just as much. Maybe even more.
Not everything needs to be an epic project in order to have value.
A handful of onions can become pickled onions. Two cucumbers can become refrigerator pickles. Four tomatoes can become salsa for dinner. A fistful of herbs can become herb salt. And one beet can become one very tiny jar of pickled beets.
And that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay.
So here’s what I did with my one beet
Quick pickling has been one of my favorite kitchen tricks for years for exactly this reason: it scales up or down beautifully.
I’ve shared my master formula before, and there’s a version in my upcoming cookbook as well, so I won’t turn this into another dissertation on pickling.
But here’s the basic formula I’ve used for years:
My Basic Quick-Pickle Brine
- 1 cup vinegar
- 1 cup water
- 1 tablespoon salt
- 1 tablespoon sugar, optional
That amount is enough for roughly two pint jars, so I scaled it down a little for my lone beet.
The sugar isn’t required, but it softens the bite of the vinegar.
How to do it:
I cooked Mr. Beet until tender, peeled and sliced him, then tucked the slices into a clean pint jar.
I mixed together the brine ingredients in a small saucepan and brought them to a boil so the salt and sugar dissolved. Then I poured the brine over the beet, let it cool, and put the jar in the refrigerator.
I let it sit for about 48 hours before eating so the flavors have a chance to settle in.
That’s it.
You can also do this with cucumbers, carrots, green beans, radishes, or garlic. If you want all the variations, vinegar options, flavor combinations, and troubleshooting, I have a full quick-pickling guide here.
My preservation philosophy for this season:
Preserve what you have—big or small. Don’t wait until there’s enough to make it feel impressive.
Use the handful. Fill the tiny jar. Make the salsa for one dinner.
The point isn’t how much we can put away. The point is knowing how to take whatever is in front of us and make something useful from it.
I’ve spent a lot of years believing the biggest things were the most worthwhile. But this season is teaching me to pay more attention to the small stuff.
The one beet.
The one jar.
The humble rooms in my house.
My handful of chickens.
The three garden beds instead of twenty.
The twenty acres instead of sixty.
The things that don’t look like much, but still matter— deeply.
Perhaps abundance isn’t always measured in quantity. Sometimes it’s simply recognizing the value in what’s already there.
—Jill
P.S. If you like flexible formulas and frameworks like this one, you’d probably like Meal Craft too. It’s built around learning simple kitchen patterns you can adapt to whatever you have on hand—so dinner doesn’t require the perfect recipe or the perfect ingredients.
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Adaptation is how we humans evolved into the smartest omnivora on the planet.
I’m about 20 years older than you, Jill. When our kids moved out, the quantity of food needed decreased by about 75%. Those kids ate a lot. Now it’s just my wife and I. The shift in the volume of food to be preserved went from larger gardens of single vegetables to smaller gardens with more variety, from many canner loads of single foods to fewer canner loads with multiple foods and from quart jars to pints.
I have no doubt you will adapt to the new challenges because you have a great blend of both gunpowder and lace in your personality. In the meantime, do something fun everyday with the extra time you have been given this season.
Your new life suits you! I also am growing one or two beets so thank you for the recipe!
Love your articles and the transparency. Scaling back, forced or voluntary, is lifestyle dependent and the attitude with which we do it is the tell-all sign of being a seasoned homesteader; we roll with the punches, learn from every challenge and still manage to get results. Thanks for true grit and get-er-done attitude.
BTW, the links did not work in this article.
Well now I’m singing The Go-Go’s “We Got The Beat” and I hope you are, too. As a black thumb/ plant hospice/ kitchen hopeless… I’m very much buoyed up by this. My pittance of plantings “count”. At the very least because the attempt continually brings me small bursts of joy.
I can set that right next to my red onion pickle in the fridge. 🙂
ZenHugs
Hi Jill, you sound like you are coming out of your funk! You go girl! We are behind you all your aspirations and experiences! Hug the kids for us! Keep smiling!
Jill–technical difficulty
I could not get the full quick-pickling guide to open. The arrow never came up for me to click on. Am I missing the trick? Pls advise! I don’t want to miss out on any of your recipes
You can try this link: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2019/08/quick-pickled-vegetables.html or, click the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of our website and put in the word ‘quick’ to find a list of articles, including this one.
THANX! IT WORKED.
Beet Pesto…… Good with crackers and french bread.
Ooh! I’ll have to try that sometime
I didn’t have much of a garden this year. Too much rain combined with wicked hot dry spells. Thank goodness I have farmer friends. I was only able to pickle 1 pint jar of beets. I will savor those for as long as I can!?
I’m really sorry to hear about your garden troubles, that is so frustrating. Your pickles look good though.
I was wondering if you have a recipe list or more info out about what’s inside your next book?
One of my daughters (whose favourite food is homestead pie) wants a cookbook for her birthday with “lots of treats” and I’m trying to figure out whether your new book has lots of desserts and sweet things for her to make – my family loves the recipes in your first book.
I haven’t been getting mailing list updates from you for a while (not sure what happened) so haven’t heard anything about what’s in your new book other than what you’ve posted on the blog – is there anywhere I can see a recipe list or a ‘look inside’ preview?
We’ll look into your account today and figure out if we can get it fixed so you get our emails again! Thanks for the head’s up. We have more details on the new cookbook here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-cookbook and we’ll update that post (and share more here on the blog, in emails, and social media) as we get closer to October. Stay tuned!