Summer Borscht (Холодный борщ)

Wow, September already?  Jeez.

Cold borscht is a dish I think of around this time of year, just as fresh beets are coming up, right around late August.  The first time I ever had it was on my birthday in my little kitchen in Iwate.  I'd thrown myself a birthday shindig and invited a few work colleagues.  Three hours before guests were set to show up my boss knocked on my door, arms full with a big pot full of beets and dairy, and without much of an explanation or apology took over my kitchen to make his specialty: cold borscht.  He had to make it at my house, he explained after twenty minutes of silence, because his -- like most Japanese homes -- didn't have an oven and roasting was the key, he said.

Up to that point I'd heard of borscht but never tried it.  I didn't even know what was in it (despite two years of college Russian).  And now here was my Japanese boss happily shucking roast beets and popping them into a pot full of broth.  Surreal moment, right there.

He was a super sweet guy.  I miss those folks.

Mr. Wakayanagi was kind enough to let me watch over his shoulder.  I didn't have the good sense to write things down as he worked, instead committing the process to memory.  I think most of it stuck, but to be honest it was kind of a wild party so I might be missing a few steps.  Even the pictures are hazy.

I still don't even remember this guy's name.  I called him Bambi after that.

The back story, if I understood it correctly, is that Mr. Wakayanagi's family had roots in Hokkaido and the recipe had been passed down that way.  It might be more complex than that (most likely it is), but that's the bit I feel confident about.  At any rate it's a good recipe, excellent for a colorful dinner on a hot day.

Summer Borscht (Холодный борщ)

Makes:  ~ 8 cups (easily halved for a more manageable batch)

Credits:  Wakayanagi-kachosan, plus some input from various Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian recipes.

Total Time to Make:  60 minutes to roast beets, 30 min to cool the beets, 45 min to cook the soup & eggs, 2+ hours to cool the soup, 15 minutes to garnish/serve.  So ballpark 4.5 - 5 hours start to finish.

Ingredients:

• Approximately half a dozen large fresh beets, washed & trimmed.  Reserve greens for other uses.
• Can sub:  3 cups of chopped canned beets
• 4 cups beef, chicken, or vegetable stock
• Juice from 1 lemon
• 2 tsp majoram
• 1 TBS soy sauce
• 1 cup Greek/plain yogurt + 1 cup milk 
• Alternative:  can use 2 cups of plain kefir, drinkable yogurt, or, if so inclined, buttermilk
• 3-4 hard-boiled eggs
• fresh dill, chopped cucumber, scallions, and sour cream for garnish
• optional:  peeled, boiled, cubed potato for garnish

Directions:

1. Individually wrap fresh beets in tinfoil.  Add a few drops of water to each packet.  Bake at 400F for 40-60 minutes or until tender.  Allow to cool enough to handle safely.
2. Remove tops & bottoms of beets.  Use fingers to peel them completely.  Cube the beets.  
3. Heat the stock in a large soup pan on medium-low or simmer.  Add beet cubes.  Do not allow the stock to boil.  
4. Add majoram, lemon, and soy sauce.  
5. Keep on low heat, stirring gently every 5-10 minutes, for 30-45 minutes or until the stock has turned deep purple.
6. Remove from heat, allow to cool to room temperature.
7. Using a standing blender or immersion blender, puree the beet soup.  Take extreme care not to splash, as beets stain on contact and can easily ruin clothing or kitchen towels.  (Apron recommended.)
8. Mix yogurt and milk together with a whisk.  Add the yogurt mix (or kefir/buttermilk) to the soup.
9. Refrigerate the soup for 2+ hours (or overnight).  Be certain the soup pot is room temperature before placing in the fridge, as placing hot objects on cold shelves can cause them to shatter or crack.
10. To serve:  place a generous handful of chopped cucumber in a bowl.  Ladle cold soup overtop.  Top with slices of hardboiled egg, scallions, fresh dill, and sour cream (if desired).  Optionally, add cubes of potato to the bowl with the cucumbers for a heartier soup.

In my searches I found that there are many variants on cold borscht (also called holodnik, or holodni borscht), many of which center around how to cook the beets and what kind of dairy to use.  The options, far as I could tell, are: (1) boil/bake the beets, either separately or in the broth; and, (2) use various combinations of yogurt, kefir, milk, sour cream, or -- and this makes me gag to think about -- buttermilk.  There was even one that, so far as I could tell, was just shredded beets in a quart of buttermilk.  I...  yeah, no.  I don't do it that way.  

I like to roast fresh beets (for sweetness, also to keep dirt out of the stock since they're impossible to clean perfectly).  

The idea is to scrub them, cut off tops and bottoms:

Wrap these individually in foil with a few drops of water in each packet:

And then roast 'em at 400F for 40-60 minutes or until they're tender.  Let them cool long enough to handle comfortably.  You'll find that the peels slide right off:

See how easy?  I seriously ate an entire beet just like this.  Nature's candy!

Once they're peeled, cut the beets into cubes.

Now you're ready to get started!

Warm up your stock (beef, veg, or chicken all okay depending on your tastes), but -- and this is SUPER important -- do not let the stock get warm enough to boil.  The reason this is important is because if the beets get too hot they'll turn grey and get a little bitter.  This won't ruin the soup, but it will rob it of the gorgeous pink-purple color.  I keep the heat on medium low until it just starts to steam, then turn it down to low-low and drop the beets in.

Since the beets are already cooked it's not critical to heat the stock for long.  I give it about 30-45 minutes to let the color and flavor from the beets seep in.  (And give me time to boil the eggs.  I won't go over how to do that here -- just ask Google if you're not sure how to hard-boil an egg.)

Add in your lemon juice:

Majoram:

And soy (or salt, if you're avoiding gluten/soy):

Once the stock's good and red I take it off the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.  Then I blend it.  I used an immersion blender, but let me say with all seriousness that whether you use a standing blender or an immersion blender, you want to be so, so careful at this point.  Put on your scrubbiest teeshirt.  Wear an apron and gloves.  Make sure your favorite towels are out of the room.  The reason here is because it's very easy to slosh the stock onto your clothes or towel and it will stain.  So pretty please be careful and consider yourself warned.  Also, don't pour hot liquid into your standing blender.  Wait for it to cool first or you could end up with a cracked blender and hot purple liquid all over.  

This will give you a gorgeous dark purple puree:

When I learned the recipe from Mr. Wakayanagi, he used a drinkable yogurt product from the local dairy that's not unlike kefir.  Since my local market doesn't stock either of these things, I kludge it with a mixture of half yogurt and half whole milk.  Seems to work just fine.  If you want it more sour, use more yogurt.  If you want it really sour, use sour cream.  If you want it OMGSOUR, use buttermilk.  Up to you.

The way I do it, I first measure out a cup of Greek yogurt:

And then whisk it together with a cup of milk:

Into the pot it goes!

This is seriously my favorite part.  I love love love watching the colors change.

Isn't that amazing?

Damn, nature, you gorgeous!

Pop that bad boy in the fridge for a couple of hours -- even a day or two if you want -- and let it get good & cold.  When you're ready to serve, pop a handful of chopped cucumber into a bowl and ladle the soup over it.

Doesn't that pink just blow your mind?

Next up are 1-2 halves of a boiled egg (alternatively, you can chop it up into small pieces), and a few pinches each of fresh dill and scallions:

Tell me that doesn't look like Elmo.  

You can also top it off with a dollop of sour cream if you want:

And that's it!  You also put in cooked, cubed potato pieces if you want, or serve it with rolls.  Up to you.  

It's great on a hot day because it's full of fresh veg, has protein, and best of all is nice and cool.  Just make sure not to wear your favorite shirt to dinner.

Salad and Quinoa and Beans, oh my!

The only thing I like better than referring to summer in the past tense is referring to autumn in the present tense.  Not built for hot weather, me.

What I do love about summer, though, is the food.  Fresh cucumbers, salads with sun-ripened tomatoes, grilled eggplant, stuffed zucchini, buckets of garden veggies to pass out to neighbors and co-workers...  it really doesn't get any better, in my book.

As someone who focuses a lot on seasonal eating, much of my diet the last several months has been salads and similar fresh-veg cold dishes.  Therefore rather than presume to reinvent the wheel, I haven't been doing much posting.  If I'm honest with you, I'll most likely never be one of those people who makes new dishes every week just to have something to post.  Instead, you get my faves whenever I make them.  Isn't that nice?

Anyway, now that summer's unofficially over, I thought I'd share with you my favorite hot-weather foods.  You'll notice that all of them follow the same basic theme: quinoa or chickpeas, fruit or veg, possibly dressing.  There's a few departures, but even as much as I tried to categorize them some fall into multiple categories.

Enough yammer, let's get down to it!  I also plan to post a peaches & cream quinoa oatmeal in the next week, too, just as soon as I finish recovering from diverticulitis*.

(*I really cannot recommend any part of it, just FYI.)


I wanted to add in some of the stunning beautiful pictures that the recipe authors have on their pages, but almost none of them have their pictures watermarked and I didn't want to just steal their gorgeous work.  But please, please let me encourage you to click through the links if only to enjoy the bright, cheery colors!

Salads

• Moroccan orange & olive salad
• I love the spicy, unexpected contrast of sweet oranges with sour olives.  So exciting!
• Cucumber & strawberry poppyseed salad
• Who doesn't need more fruit in their salads?
• Balsamic watermelon chicken salad

• One of the few chicken salads I like.  I normally feel like the whole point of salad is not to have to eat chicken, and indeed this is just as good without it.  
• Raw pad thai salad
• Do yourself a favor and visit this recipe just to drink in the colors!  Love this one.
• Southwestern chopped salad with cilantro-lime dressing
• Yummmm, corn on salad.  Never get sick of it.
• Tomato and corn tabbouleh salad with kale
• See?  Corn.  Perfection.
• Watermelon salad with feta and almonds
• This is also really good with honeyed pecans or walnuts.  Leave the tomatoes out if that part's weird for you.

Roasted Veggies

• Roasted eggplant with chickpeas and yogurt tahini sauce
• A meal in itself.  Love it.
• Miso-roasted eggplant
• Shiso is hard to find outside of specialty stores, so you may find that you just make the eggplant and sub in your favorite toppings.  Think of it as a kind of squishy pizza.
• Roasted sweet potato salad with cranberry-chipotle dressing
• I could eat this as easily at Thanksgiving as I do in the summer.  Yum.
• Oven-baked zucchini "chips"
• Oven fries from veggies are a classic.  

Beans

• Thug Kitchen's chickpea tabbouleh
• Quick note:  Thug Kitchen is my hero, but if strong language offends you then you'll want to give this one a skip.  On the other hand if you, like myself, want all your recipes to sound like they're written by Quentin Tarantino, then this is well worth a click if only for the laughs.
• Mediterranean barley with chickpeas and arugula
•  I seriously could eat chickpeas at every meal.  
• Texas "caviar"
• Do everyone you know a favor and bring this to the next potluck.  So, so addictive, and so healthy.  Impossible to go wrong!  I use it as dip or just eat it straight with a spoon.
• Edamame salad
• This is another super colorful salad: edamame, cranberries, carrots, peppers, corn (naturally), red onions, and sesame dressing.  Flawless.
• Grilled eggplant and chickpea salad
• See what I mean?  Chickpeas every day.

Quinoa

• Crunchy cashew Thai quinoa salad with ginger-peanut dressing
• Stop whatever you're doing and try this.  Sooooo good.
• Greek pita chip nachos with chickpeas and quinoa (shown)
• My favorite.  I'm probably making them tonight. 
• Fruity couscous salad
• True, the recipe calls for couscous, but I usually use quinoa and adjust the liquid according to the box directions.
• Pumpkin quinoa salad
• Going to eat this every day all fall.  True story.
• One pan Mexican quinoa
• I often make variants of this idea using biryani or tandoori-type spices.  Maybe I'll post it soon!
• Quinoa, avocado, and spinach salad
• They have a dressing in the recipe, but you can sub your own if you prefer.  
• Quinoa tabbouleh with chickpeas
• Are you noticing a trend here?  What can I say, I like what I like.  (What I like is chickpeas.)
• "The Best Ever" summer quinoa salad
• They might not even be exaggerating.  
• Superfood salad
• Quinoa, corn, red onion, orange, avocado, black beans, and pomegranate.  Life-changing.

Moong Dal with Mushrooms & Spinach (Green Gram Lentils)

Doc and I are at the point in our lives where it seems like every week brings a new happy announcement from friends.  Babies, marriages, vacations, new houses, graduations, engagements, promotions.  It's been a giddy time.  

Last week one of my college buddies posted about some aversions she was having during her pregnancy, in particular how she was struggling with meats and dairy.  I offered up some of the dal/bean recipes I've posted.  As I went through them I realized that I had a few more I wanted to add, including this one for mung/moong dal (also called green gram).  So her happy news is good for all of us because it means a new post.

(I won't Piro-rant you with excuses about infrequent posts this spring.  The long and short of it is that I've been enjoying salads and fresh veggies more often than not.  I feel silly posting salad recipes and I don't delude myself that anyone is anxious for the next installment, so I've been waiting for recipes that I felt were worth sharing.)

Moong Dal with Mushrooms & Spinach

Total Time:  2 hours soaking (can be done while at work / overnight) + apx. 1 hour cooking the beans and ~30 minutes making the flavorings.  The process can be sped up by cooking the beans and flavorings at the same time or using a pressure cooker for the beans. 

Weirdest Spice:  Fenugreek leaves.  Can be substituted (fenugreek powder, celery seeds, celery salt, lemon leaves) or omitted.  

Credits:  I can't say I have a base or inspiration recipe for this one.  It bears a resemblance to my basic tadka dal, if that counts.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup green gram (moong / mung dal)
• 3 cups boiling water
• 1 tsp oil or ghee
• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 onion, sliced thinly
• 1 tsp ginger paste
• 1 tsp garlic paste
• 0.5 cup sliced mushrooms
• 2 tsp coriander powder
• 1 tsp cumin powder
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1.5 tsp chili powder or paprika (optional, adjust to taste)
• 2 cups pureed tomato
• 2 tsp fenugreek leaves
• 1 cup fresh spinach
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp fresh cilantro (optional)
• 1 tablespoon cream or coconut milk (optional, adjust to taste)
• salt to taste

Directions:

1. Rinse lentils thoroughly in a fine-mesh sieve under warm water until the water runs clear.
2. Pour the boiling water over the lentils in a heat-proof bowl.  Set aside to soak for 2 hours or overnight.
3. Transfer the lentils and water to a large nonstick saucepan and heat on the stove on medium-high.  When the water boils, turn the heat down to low and simmer approximately 1 hour or until lentils are soft.  Stir occasionally, adding more water if needed in order to keep the lentils covered with a small amount of water (see pictures below for an example).
4. While the lentils are booking, heat a second saucepan on medium heat.  When the pan is hot, add the oil.  When oil is shimmering, add the cumin seeds.  Allow to cook for 10-30 seconds or until fragrant.
5. Add diced onions and a dash of salt.  Saute 5-10 minutes or until translucent.
6. Add ginger & garlic pastes, saute 2 minutes.
7. Add the mushrooms, saute 5 minutes.
8. Add coriander powder, cumin powder, turmeric, and chili powder.  Cook 1-2 minutes or until fragrant, stirring constantly.  Add a small splash of water if needed to keep spices from burning.
9. Add tomato puree and stir until onion paste and tomato puree are well-mixed.  Turn heat down to low and cook, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes or until tomato darkens and loses its raw flavor.
10. Add fenugreek leaves, garam masala, and spinach.  For maximum flavor, use palms to crush the fenugreek leaves before adding.  Cook 5-10 minutes or until spinach is wilted and flavors are incorporated. 
11. When both the lentils and the tomato sauce are cooked, stir them together over low heat.  Salt to taste.
12. Optional:  add cilantro and cream or coconut milk.
13. Serve hot over rice or with flatbread.

What I like best about this lentil recipe is that it's as decadent or as simple as you want to make it.  The difference is the addition of cream or coconut milk at the end.  No cream makes it almost rustic, whereas adding it in makes it restaurant-style in richness.  Or you can shoot for somewhere in the middle, as I usually do.

The first step is to wash and soak your beans.  You can quick-soak in 2 hours by using boiling water, or do it overnight / while you're at work.  

Use 3:1 water to lentils to ensure that they're well-covered and have room to expand.  When you're done soaking you can either use the soaking water or rinse them again and use vegetable stock to cook them instead.  Up to you.

Place the lentils and the cooking water in a large saucepan and dial it up to medium-high.  Ignore the urge to add salt here as that will only increase the cooking time.  

It should take about an hour for the lentils to get soft and for most of the liquid to cook off.  Stir every 5-10 minutes.  Keep an eye so that the lentils don't get dry.  At the end you want a little water/stock in with them but not a huge amount.  Like so:

See how they're soupy but not drowning?  That's the goal at the end.  Add in more liquid as needed if they get much drier than that as they're cooking.  Depending on how dry/old your lentils are it might take more or less than an hour.  It's hard to predict because every bag of lentils is different.  For me it took about an hour and fifteen.

While the lentils are simmering, get the flavoring put together.  

It starts with a second saucepan on medium heat.  When the pan is hot, add the oil, and when the oil is hot, add your cumin seeds.  Ghee is also an okay choice if you're not going for a vegan dish.

The cumin seeds only need about 10-30 seconds in the oil before you'll smell them.  Immediately add in your sliced onions and stir so that the cumin seeds don't burn.

After about 5-10 minutes you'll find the onions have softened up and gotten a bit translucent.  That's the time to add the ginger and garlic pastes.  For some reason, I missed getting a picture of that.  Sorry guys.

Cook the ginger and garlic, stirring occasionally, for about 2-3 minutes.  Then add in the mushroom slices.

About 5 minutes is what it should take for the mushrooms to soften up.  When they are soft add in the spices.  Also toss in a splash of water or stock if the mixture is looking dry in order to keep the spices from burning.

Stir the mushroom-onion-spice mix about 1-2 minutes to cook the spices.

Next up is the tomato puree.  You could use canned or fresh, whatever makes you happiest.

Stir the onion mix and the tomatoes together until they're well incorporated.

Turn the heat down to low to keep the tomatoes from scorching.  Stir from time to time as well.

It'll take about 20 minutes or so for the tomatoes to cook through and lose their raw taste.  They'll also darken up a bit, as you can see here:

The spices in the above photo are fenugreek leaves and garam masala.  Fenugreek leaves get a big boost in flavor from crushing them between your palms just as you add them in.  If you don't have any, go ahead leave them out.  You could potentially replace it with makrut leaves or celery salt for a similar flavor, but it's not necessary.

This is also when you'll want to add in the spinach, which until it wilts will probably seem like an absurd amount.

It'll take about 5-10 minutes for the spinach to wilt and mix into the tomato sauce.  After that it's time to pour the tomato sauce into the cooked lentils.

Stir it well so that the tomato sauce is completely incorporated into the lentils.  Add salt to taste.

If you're a fan of cilantro you can add in a little at this point.

And if you want a richer, creamier flavor you can add in either heavy cream or coconut milk (according to your tastes).  I only go with a small splash.  Start small, is my recommendation, and taste as you go if you think you want a lot of cream.

Stir it all up and you're good to go!


I have a preference for rice rather than rotis, but mung dal go equally well with either.

I served them up with some fresh cucumbers for crunch and some masala eggplant for kick.