Borscht! Psych. Still, though: authentic Russian soup recipe. You are thrilled I’m sure.

I don’t know, maybe America’s wrong about only eating “food” as defined by Michael Pollan — you know, ‘nothing your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize, mostly plants’ — and getting enough fiber, and only eating dessert on special occasions, and drinking 8 glasses of water a day.  Maybe all that stuff is just myths and disinformation, promulgated by various lobbies and codified by the kind of media that specializes in distracting us from ever thinking about anything actually-important.  I’m just saying!  Because, ever since I gave up on trying to wrest the kitchen-reins here away from someone who has been accustomed to having them for the better part of a century, I’ve been eating pretty much nothing but fried potatoes and fried meat-patties and fried cheese-pancakes and meat dumplings with sour cream and kasha and fried eggs and various kinds of street-kiosk pastries and chocolates — and I feel great.  Maybe a little tingly in the right arm area but otherwise a-ok!  Oh and also I’ve been eating soup. Lots and lots of soup.  This is a very popular soup around here:

Cabbage (or Cauliflower) Soup

Light the burner under the soup-pot and boil some water.  Add:

one onion cut into little pieces with a very dull knife

one-half of a cabbage  (or, in a shocking and unprecedented twist last night, one-half of a cauliflower) cut into little pieces with a very dull knife

one-half of a carrot (if available) cut into thin slices with a very dull knife

one potato cut into little pieces with a very dull knife

Boil everything until you wouldn’t need teeth to eat it.  Add “some kind of cheese, I forget.” (Possibly a farmer’s cheese or sour cream type substance? Anyway, a mystery) Return to a boil and serve!  Boys get more soup than girls.  This soup is really good, by the way.

After some soup (and fried potatoes and fried meat patties) you’ll have your mandatory after-dinner tea and maybe you’d like to accompany it with some kind of sweet thing?  I suggest you try a (lots of hard consonants-)chick.  (Plianuchik? Blilnchick? I give up).  This is like a tea cake — so, a thick biscuity sugar cookie — crossed with a donut — so, the outside is fried and then glazed.  There is a variation on this pastry that’s filled with sweetened condensed milk and rolled in coconut.   They function as a consolation prize for if you were feeling like you wanted to ever eat a raw vegetable that wasn’t a cucumber.

(I’d just like to posit that none of this is a crazier thing to eat than those salads you get in midtown superdelis that are, like, a head of cut-up romaine that a deli employee dumps into a mixing bowl and then sprinkles with the toppings of your choice, none of which will seem appealing when you’re back at your desk, and then the deli employee squirts in, inevitably, way too much dressing and the whole shebang ends up weighing like a pound and a half and costing $10.)

4 comments to Borscht! Psych. Still, though: authentic Russian soup recipe. You are thrilled I’m sure.

  • Choire

    Oh hell yes. I mean, my grandparents and their siblings lived just fine on things that were fried and then stuffed into other things that were then fried again. And then coated in dairy–sometimes dairy that was ALSO FRIED.

    Although, it now occurs to me that none of them are still alive for me to get the recipes….

  • owapapercut

    More like CABG soup

  • Rebecca A.

    Psyche!

    No seriously, keep these recipes coming. I think you have a soup book coming and I’ll look forward to buying it. I still think you’ll do better with a Kindle medium….

  • I think it will be better if I can add some more powders in the soup like garlic powder, chinamon, etc.. These will surely make it more tasty..

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