Ode to beets

I am compelled to write this evening because my husband – the computer scientistic GENIUS – is writing in HIS very own blogly space!  Which he started last night!  And could I just sit idly by and let him post away while I did nothing to improve my very own blogly space??  That would only be viable if I knew how to program alien shooter games.  And I don’t.

The fact is, I’ve been meaning to tell you all for some time now about the borsch.  K and I both spent good little portions of our lives living in Eastern Europe, where we were both introduced to the exquisiteness that is the beet.  And ever since it began to get nippy outside (for us this was early September), we have reminisced about shapkas and drunk taxi drivers on New Year’s and army tanks that shovel snow and… heavenly and oh-so-richly-red borsch.  With a huge dollop of sour cream.

So when a co-worker of mine recently said, “Oh, I have a million beets! Want some??”  I think I may have scared him a little with my emphatic enthusiasm.  I proudly brought them home and showed them to the husband, who was so emphatic himself that he tackled me (only in an attempt to wrestle the beet bag from my grasp).  And then we made borsch.

Beets are actually really horrible-looking vegetables when they’re first pulled from the dirt, like little hairy gnomes with dirty bottoms.  The Russian folk of olde probably couldn’t get their kids to eat them, so they figured out that when you peel them and grate them and make them into a soup, the kidlets would do anything to get that goodness all over their little tunics and milkmaid dresses and shapkas.  And hey, I’m right there with those little Russian peasants.

For when the borsch was simmering and it was almost time to eat, our house filled with the warm smell of a hundred different small apartments in the cities of Lithuania.  I could almost hear the chatter of a dying language coming from a tiny kitchen with nothing but a table, a stove, and a few 3-legged stools.  I opened the lid to the soup and a redness fit for royalty greeted me, bubbling gently in a pot.  And then I really was there, hiding out from a harsh Lithuanian winter with a Lithuanian grandma’s slippers on my feet, looking out the window of a tall gray building for my New Year’s taxi.  And Kendon saw that soup and heard the rumble of a faraway Soviet tank, on its way to clear the roads so he could visit a similar old woman with the same soup waiting for him on her own stove.  We ate our borsch with huge dollops of sour cream.  Then all at once we were at home with our memories and at home with each other. And nothing could be more delicious.  

Step 1: 

Step 2: 

The result: heaven.