Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Food, Drink and Cooking Wonder what the poor folks are eatin' tonight?

Numan, I promised you my beet soup recipe a while back.
Here it is and Beets are in season!


Beet Soup

1 beet, medium dice
1 onion, small dice
1 potato medium dice
4 cups chicken broth
4 Tbsp butter
Bay leaf
1Tbsp fresh chopped dill weed
1Tbsp fresh basil

Salt and pepper to taste

1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup cream

Saute onion in butter until transparent.
Add chicken broth and bring to a boil
Add beet, potato bay leaf, basil, and dill,
cook until tender. Add sour cream and cream.
Blend with immersion blender until smooth.
Correct seasoning.

That beet soup recipe sounds delicious.

It's not just delicious it's amazing. If you make this soup with canned beets it comes out a beautiful pink. If you do it with a good fresh beet it's almost blood red. I ate the whole pot of soup with fresh bread and Leffe Brown Ale.

Borscht, Bread, and Beer.

The best trout I ever had was in the lower 48. A buddy and I went on a 130 mile backpacking trip across the Frank Church River Of No Return Wilderness. Five days in we had been living on gorp, oatmeal, spinach noodles, dried apricots, and tea. We spent a long day descending from the alpine region of the Bighorn Crags down to the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, then up Big Creek for a couple of miles. I almost stepped on a timber rattler that Ron, in his fatigue, had just stepped over in the trail, thinking it was a pile of sticks. I thought it was a pile of sticks, too, except that it was rattling and all coiled up.

We made camp in a large cave, excavated by some crazy-ass miners eighty years earlier. Ron started a fire and I took my fly rod down to Big Creek about 30 feet away. Within five minutes I had caught two fat westslope cutthrout trout and cleaned them. They went right on the little grill we had with us, with a tiny bit of butter. Ten minutes later we were licking our fingers after an utterly transcendent dining experience.

The best coffee I ever had was seven days later on the same hike. We found a partial 3 pound can of Folgers lying in the trail, probably lost by a horse packer. Getting close to the end of our trip we were a bit ahead of schedule for meeting our ride at Mackay Bar on the South Fork of the Salmon. So we made camp at 1:00 in the afternoon and started a pot of cowboy coffee, which is a pan of water heated on the campfire with some coffee grounds thrown in. We drank the finest coffee in the world for the next four hours.

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Thank you, Greger, for giving us your borscht recipe.
It is not too different from the way I have been making it, except that I use seared cubes of beef and do not blend it -- so I guess it is more like a stew. I also add only sour cream at the table -- I like the color contrast.

Naturally, living here in New Age Lotus Land, I have many vegetarian friends, so if I substitute vegetable broth (I wonder if miso would work?), I think your recipe would be good to serve to guests.
(Japanese-East European borscht? -- ah, well, we do live in the 21st century!)

I think your chunky recipe might be more Russian or Ukrainian than mine, which I consider to be a Polish Creamed Beet Soup - Barszcz Zabielany But I'm not Polish and I wrote the recipe myself without any input from a Polish Babka.
Technically I think the broth should be the water that Kielbasa was cooked in. But this is a small, fast, pot of soup that is gloriously delicious. In it's simplest form, a can of beets, an onion, and a potato, a couple of chicken or beef bouillon cubes, water and a dollop of sour cream will get supper on the table in a matter of minutes.
It's kind of a pain if you don't have an immersion blender though, I'd hate to do it in a regular blender.

For Vegans you might need to use a soft silken tofu instead of sour cream and a couple of teaspoons of vinegar to correct the acidity.

While I've been thinking about beets I've looked at a variety of recipes online and the one which seems most exciting is a very large pot of Borscht cooked with a rack of spareribs in it.

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You can boil spareribs? !! · ·

Your point about correcting for acidity is a good one.
I will keep it in mind.

Yes, it helps to make sure the pork is thoroughly cooked.