Borscht!

We’ve decided that we need to start making our own soups. One of us recently discovered that we are allergic to onions (in addition to being allergic to pepper already) and, well… next time you saunter down the soup aisle (or the “ethnic” aisle or the frozen aisle), just pick up something at random and see if it has “onion” or “onion powder” (or “pepper” or “spices”) in it. Then, if it does, yell “BUT THAT WAS MY FAVORITE!” and put it back and then never eat it again.

Welcome to Chez Jaybird.

Anyway, as I was saying, we’ve decided that we need to start making our own soups. Open a cookbook and get a recipe that calls for “two onions” and you don’t have to start over. You can just leave them out. Replace them with cauliflower or something. Cabbage. Something that tastes good anyway and isn’t onion.

As such, we’ve picked up a handful of cookbooks recently and the most interesting of them all seems to be The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking: A Year of Our Soups (Compass). They do this cute padding thing where they border their various recipes with “uplifting” stories about how this particular recipe helped someone who needed, among other things, a bowl of soup.

So we are flipping through the cookbook and saying “this sounds good” and “that sounds nice” when we stumble across “Borscht”. Now, one thing you might want to know about Colorado Springs is that nobody knows how to make borscht here. When I lived in Michigan? Everybody either made it all the time or lived next door to someone who made it all the time. If there was a borscht debate, it was over the whole issue of “sour cream vs. no sour cream”… and I think that that was the folks of Polish ancestry arguing against the folks of Russian ancestry involved with that (I’m a “sour cream” partisan, myself).

Anyway, as you’re about to see, this recipe had… and I hope you’re sitting down… *MEAT*.

Yeah! I know!

Borscht doesn’t have meat in it! It’s a beet and cabbage soup with a handful of not-too-exciting spices that you eat when you’re missing the folks who missed the old country. A good, thick soup that makes whatever you are eating into a good solid meal. (Seriously, there were folks around who had borscht every night whether they were also eating hamburgers, pizza, or a Thanksgiving Feast… it wasn’t “supper” unless you had a mouthful of borscht at some point in the meal.)

This is one of those things that made no sense to me when I was an adolescent but, now that I’m an adult, makes me say “when was the last time we had a decent bowl of borscht?”

Anyway, we open up the cookbook and see the following:

4 Pounds Beef Chuck
1 Pound Pork Shoulder
2 Pounds Soup Bones
Salt and Pepper to taste
8 Peppercorns
1 Bay Leaf
6 Uncooked Beets (stems removed)
1 Small Cabbage (shredded)
1 Tablespoon Fresh Lemon Juice
1/2 Cup Minced Dill
1/2 Cup Sour Cream

And here come the directions:
Trim the fat off the beef and pork, place the meat in a kettle with the bones, cover with water, add the salt, pepper, peppercorns, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat and cover and cook for 2 hours. Skip the top with a slotted spoon. Check the meat with a fork to check to see if it’s tender and, if so, remove meat, cut it into chunks, then set aside.

In a separate pot, cook the beets in enough water to cover for about 30 minutes, remove beets then cut into strips and please the beet strips into meat broth, add cabbage, return soup to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Add lemon juice, meat, and simmer for another 15 minutes. Add one tablespoon of dill and stir. Mix remaining dill into sour cream and place 1 tablespoon of mixture in each soup bowl, pour borscht over it, and serve.

Now, if you’re like me? You say “I don’t have time for that crap.”

So here’s what I did. I got out my Slow Cooker. Then I cut all of the ingredients in half and worked from there.

I sprayed the bowl thingy, whatever it is, with Pam. I put the bones in there. I diced up the meat and threw it in there. I salted everything until it looked nice and salted. I threw a bay leaf in there and then diced up my beets and my cabbage. I threw my beets and cabbage in there. I then added enough water to fill up the bowl thingy, whatever it is, about halfway… the meat was covered and the beets were halfway covered and the cabbage wasn’t.

I put this mixture in the fridge overnight.

The next morning, I put it on “cook low 10 hours” and went to work.

When I got home, I took a whole lemon, cut it in half, then squeezed the juice into the cooked mixture and stirred it up real nice and took the bones out and threw the bones away. I put a tablespoon or so of dill into the soup and let it simmer.

I then made the nice little dill/sour cream mixture and plopped a good dollop of it into a soup bowl and poured the “it’s not borscht, more of a beet stew, really” over the dillycream and, you know what? It reminded me of borscht. Only meatier. I served it with buttered rolls and stories about the Eastern European place downtown that closed a while back and how they had pictures of Jaromír Jágr all over the walls and how they made a decent borscht, bless them. Proper vegetarian borscht.

It was good enough for me to say that you should try a bowl of it yourself.