Russian-Style Beet and Cabbage Soup

"Boris... why you not come home for borscht?  I make traditional family recipe!"

A simple truth:  the only reason I ever even looked up a borscht recipe in the first place was because of the horrifically inaccurate Russian-accented phrase above.  It is actually the only thing I'll say when attempting an Eastern European accent.  It is for this reason that I eventually came to be obsessed with borscht, which is otherwise nothing to covet.  As a matter of fact, President Obama recently knocked its main ingredient, beets, pretty hard by expressly omitting them from the new White House garden he and Michelle intend to start.  WHATEVER.  I refuse to be so much of a slave to fashion that I'll come off my borscht/beet pedestal and pander to this sudden anti-beet craze... I'm sticking to my guns!

Anyhow, not long ago I cruised a few borscht recipes to get a feel for what sort of variety I could expect and most were pretty similar.  I believe I ended up going with this particular recipe because it didn't ask for too much that I didn't have on hand by means of spices and I was likely to have any of the vegetables, save the beets, on hand at any given time in the form of leftovers from a prior dish.  I was excited to see a recipe that called for both carrots and cabbage, two veggies I've been admittedly geeked on lately.  Click Here For Creamy Borscht Recipe  Another draw was that it was a crockpot recipe and in the wake of my new crockpot purchase any such recipe has proven irresistible.  =]

  

With my culinary guinea pig Danger Faint on hand, we spent a solid half-hour dicing vegetables in my trashed kitchen (I'm developing this strange habit of cooking in the immediate aftermath of huge parties, perhaps because it necessitates doing the dishes?) before we realized that we were eventually transferring everything from the crockpot to a blender anyhow.  So I advise anyone considering this recipe not to be too meticulous in that regard, get the veggies small enough to cook through in the slow-cooker but don't worry too much about aesthetics at this point.  We made our vegetable broth with a few veggie boullion cubes in a money-saving move, I don't think the taste is any different from the pre-made cartons of stock that you can buy anyway.  After the crockpot phase we put everything straight to the blender, forgetting the vinegar, salt and pepper... oops?  So we just added it into the one gallon pitcher that we chose to store it in (still sitting in my fridge, looking exactly like raspberry smoothie!  It's only a matter of time before Kathan slips and sips!), no harm, no foul.  We opted for the vegan sour creme over the soy yogurt simply because we were looking for an excuse to have vegan sour creme on hand for our next run at breakfast burritos!  

I had a great time making this simple recipe and the end result was satisfying.  I'm not certain I would rush to make this exact recipe again, but I wouldn't advise against it.  I'm not sure what alterations, if any I'd make... any ideas???

GRITS SON!

I moved into my very first apartment on January 1, 2005.  It was the dingiest, most repulsive four walls I've ever subjected myself to, but at the time it was affordable and I wasn't aware that someone my age could even live anywhere cleaner.  One of my roommates (the one I didn't have to share a bedroom with) had a pretty sweet hookup for free home cooking through his mom's catering company which, coincidentally enough, I used to work for.  Around the day our fridge broke his mom had given us this gigantic vat of cheesy grits, which I had only ever even heard of through the episode in Duck Tales in which the Civil War re-enactors fired piles of the stuff at each other through cannons... good episode actually.  Anyhow, we were poor, it was free and the clock was ticking on how long it would keep in our busted fridge... so we attacked it with ravenous fury.  To my surprise, it was DELICIOUS.  Just add salt and pepper, reheat and it was an instant free breakfast, lunch and dinner for days!

After purchasing my first slow-cooker the other day I started cruising vegan recipes on my phone while I was at work (Employee of the Month) and I stumbled across a very simple recipe for grits.  Click Here For Grits Recipe  It has got to be the simplest recipe I've attacked to date.  For anyone not familiar with grits, I can only describe them as either cornmeal porridge or mashed potatoes sans potatoes, add corn.  To get a feel for how these grits might taste I took a bear-bones approach and used boiling water in lieu of soy milk or vegetable broth and I skipped the optional butter or olive oil.  It occurred to me as strange that a crock pot recipe called for constant stirring but I soon learned why.  I got the grits going right before I worked for a few hours so I had the chance to stir them once or twice before skipping out and I noticed a little bit of build up on the sides of the crock pot.  When I got home it was straight up CORN BREAD surrounding the finished grits in the middle.  Oops.  I did my best to mash and incorporate it into the legit grits with mixed success but after a healthy smattering of salt and pepper they didn't taste half bad, perhaps a bit bland (sorry Jamie!).  

Being that I have a gigantic bag of cornmeal on hand now I'm certain I'll tackle this recipe again but with a few key revisions.  I would definitely go with the soy milk instead of the boiled water and I'd add the optional vegan butter to try to give it a bit more flavor.  Also, something I'd considered but decided against initially was to score some absurdly expensive vegan cheese and add that to the mix in some fashion to harken back to my grit roots!