Pureed vegetarian borscht

Posted in Food on November 8th, 2009 by monicajane

Photo a little blurry, but what a nice color:

soup1

Borscht is a soup people tend to either go hot or cold on. I’m hot for it. Love it. I thought of that as one can eat it hot or cold too! (ugh, bad play on words, perhaps?) It can also be made with meat or just veggies. There are endless variations. I simply used what I had around as is my wont to do.

Ingredients:

  • 6 beets (I used three orange and three red beets)
  • 1 small purple cabbage
  • 24 oz crushed tomato
  • 48 oz vegetable stock
  • 3 carrots
  • 1 very large red onion
  • 12 cloves of garlic
  • 3 tbls dill (fresh would be better, I used dry)
  • 1/2 cup very strong red wine vinegar (I get this really rocking stuff from a winery in California’s Napa Valley. My step father is the source. I have never liked the weak crap you can get in the grocery store and also grew up with fine vinegar. This stuff is thick and dark and you can’t see through it–it’s a whole other realm of wonderful–if you have ordinary vinegar you might want to use more as you like)
  • 1 tbls paprika
  • Salt to taste

soup

I cut up everything in relatively large chunks as I am not well enough to do lots of time consuming stuff, including endless chopping. (I’m a hard-core foodie so I can’t give it up, but I do have to take a lot of short cuts) If you can cut some of the veggies before hand and saute them, that’s better. Then whether you puree it at the end is a matter of taste.

I just did big chunks and threw all the ingredients in a pot and let it cook for about an hour and a half. I then let it cool a bit and pureed it in a blender.

Top with thick delicious greek yogurt.

Related posts:

  1. Roasted Beet Salad
  2. Asian cole slaw
  3. Festive roasted root veggies
  4. Lentil soup with bison sausage
  5. Summer gazpacho — with that which happened to be in my kitchen/garden
  1. Joanne says:

    I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about borscht since I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about beets. I was semi-traumatized by them when I was a kid and haven’t tried them again since. I always love their color and find it so appealing, though, so I really should give them another chance.

  2. monicajane says:

    try roasting a beet and see how you like that. Start with just one. I make a salad with roasted beets that is killer here:

    http://yeswecook.com/2009/08/roasted-beet-salad/

    Add goat cheese and it’s even better! If you don’t like that then I wouldn’t move forward with the borscht!

  3. For me it depends on the borscht. This is a big borscht area because there are a lot of Doukhobors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobor) here. I hate beets, so I don’t like borscht with beets in it, but I have a killer beet-less recipe I just love. Man is it rich, though!

  4. monicajane says:

    do share your beetless recipe…just a list of ingredients if you don’t mind?

  5. Here: http://retorte.blogspot.com/2008/08/russian-borscht.html

    I don’t work for these people anymore so I guess I could send you the entire recipe if you’d like. Send me an email wandering_coyoteATyahooDOTca.

  6. monicajane says:

    thanks WC…
    the recipe as it is on your blog is great…I never measure anything…except now that I’m writing recipes I try to pay attention to what I do so that it can be repeated…or improved as necessary.

  7. I was trying to be discrete. ;)

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