I DO NOT WANT TO GO CHANGE CLOTHES AND GO TO THE STORE AND BUY SOME!! Would you guys all PLEASE try to understand this?? 
There’s several ways of making it: one is you actually cook your veggies: usually, carrots, peas, potatoes, sometimes pickled cucumbers, maybe a bit of pickled apple. Other recipes substitute in canned veggies where appropriate. Others, frozen veggies. Yes, they are thawed first.
I do believe they’re allowed to thaw first. 
Unless you have your own garden and can cook every day with stuff you’ve just picked yourself, frozen veg is actually better for you than what you find in the Produce department at your local supermarket. It’s frozen within hours of being picked, while Produce veg sits around for days before you buy it.
So am I now, and I have a jar of pickled beets with onions in the cupboard! 
Would it help if I told my pickled beets story? It involves the word “abattoir”.
Eating them now. Nom nom nom
Yes. PLEASE. davidm appears to be bound and determined to make my afternoon miserable and make me go to the damn store.
Perhaps, :dubious: but they taste like hell.
Sorry. :o It’s just that they’re sooo good.
When I was a small child, I loved pickled beets. This was considered weird, and possibly unnatural, but it generally worked out well for me, as I got excellent exchange rates on them for almost anything when they appeared in school lunches. I considered them a treat.
(What follows is spoilered for the benefit of those who don’t care for gross-out TMI.)
[spoiler]One day, I was feeling rather unwell, and was regarding the prospect of lunch somewhat dubiously. But, hey–beets! What’s more, my best friend made our customary cornbread/beets transaction without even asking, and the only thing better than beets was more beets. A child’s trepidation, however well justified, tends to evaporate at the sight of a favored treat, so even though I ignored everything else on the plate, I scarfed the beets, washing them down with a little milk.
It quickly became obvious that this had been an error in judgment.
Moments later, I was scuttling for the door of the cafeteria. A teacher moved to intercept me, and–not daring to open my mouth–I was forced to explain via pantomime that I was only seconds away from redecorating the room, and possibly triggering a chain reaction. Bless her, either she was fluent in mime, or she correctly interpreted the suppressed heaving motions, and got out of my way, enabling me to reach the bathroom before reviewing inputs.
It was ghastly. The bowl looked like a basin full of runoff from an abattoir. Milk lent opacity, making the returning beet juice look even more blood-like as it spattered over white porcelain, and (mostly) chewed bits of beet floated in the pool like the gruesome remnants of a chainsawed liver. The combined smell and taste of beet brine and curdled milk could stand as the Platonic Form of Vomit.
The teacher had quite responsibly followed me, and arrived just in time to get a good look at the horror that beets had wrought. She went ghostly pale and lunged into the next stall to puke, but quickly mastered herself, and–believing that I was actually puking blood–tried to get me to lie down while she went to call an ambulance. Confusion reigned for a few moments, with each of us suppressing dry heaves, until I managed to convince her that I was not in imminent danger of turning inside out or spawning an alien. She eventually calmed down, and settled for sending me home.[/spoiler]
It was over thirty years before I ate another beet.
A fine addition. To add to this, try a 1/4 tsp each of fresh grated nutmeg and cayenne. Also, I have stopped using elbow macaroni and switched to rotini - it holds the cheese sauce better.
To be clear, some Americans find chicken and waffles a strange combo, and consider maple syrup on bacon kind of a mismatch.
And we disagree with each other on cornbread: Some make it a sweet cake, some make it relatively bland, and some put “cracklins” (pork fat) in it.
I usually go with shells. They scoop up the cheese sauce and they fit in with the theme.
In the southwest, they add chopped jalapenos.
Is that it? Or are you saying other ingredients get added to the cheese and sauce?
I think I know what he’s talking about, and it literally is just those three ingredients: cheese, garlic, mayonnaise. I’ll await confirmation, though, but that concoction does exist.
So you just eat a plate of shredded cheese with mayonnaise (and a little garlic) mixed in?
Heck, I’m a redneck and even I think that’s pretty extreme.
AFAIK, you serve it with some bread, so it’s more like a spread/dip kind of thing. Once again, someone can correct me, but that’s how I’ve encountered it.
Right. Eating a whole plate of it would be a bit extreme. It, like salat Olivier, is meant to be eaten in small quantities, usually in conjunction with bread.
Heretics!