A good day for Borscht

It's cold again this morning.  I guess winter really is coming.  The wood stove has been a real treasure these past two weeks or so.  By the way, the red beans I cooked on the stove turned our great.  It inspired me to look into other things to cook on the wood stove.  I was thinking about having to using the wood stove as our only source of heat and cooking.  There are a few things that we simply cannot live without, at least not at first.  My first thought was about coffee.  We have an electric drip coffee maker like the rest of world that depends on the electric company.  When I was a kid my dad made coffee on the gas stove in a little aluminum percolator coffee pot.  I used that percolator when I went camping in the woods in Florida as a teenager.  I have no idea what ever happened to that beat up percolator but I know it made good coffee.  I went to Amazon and found a reasonably priced, stainless steel percolator, about $20.00.  I also splurged on the $1.99 glass top for it since it came with a plastic one.  Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why I did that, but looks really cool and if you are going to use something you should like it.  I like it with the glass top. I made coffee in the percolator this morning but I confess I did it on the stove in the kitchen, not the wood stove, because I was cooking this morning - more about that below.  The coffee was OK but I need to relearn making coffee in the percolator.  Lesson #1, no matter how much of a good idea it seems like, don't use a paper filter.  Maybe the next pot will be on the wood stove without the paper filter.  I also looked at a bunch of cast iron cookware and came to a startling discovery.  Most cast iron cookware available in the USA is made in China.  That is unsat in the extreme.  There are a couple of cast iron companies in America but they will not be enough to sustain us all if things really go to pot.  The lesson there is: buy your cast iron now. 

So yesterday we did some work in the garden.  I stacked another layer of tire on top of the tire gardens that have the winter veggies in them and we covered the top with re-purposed windows that Steph got from a demolition project this summer.  The long term plan for the windows is a small green house, but we didn't get there this year.  The timing was perfect, we had a hard frost this morning and our tender young spinach, cabbage, radishes and cauliflower were covered.  The plan is that the black tires will absorb heat and the clear windows will allow the sunshine in.  The windows are placed loosely atop the tires so hopefully they will ventilate well without being drafty.

While in the garden I pulled the last of the sweet potatoes from the ground and was pleasantly surprised at the amount and sizes of them.  We had baked sweet potatoes with our dinner last night, have plenty of large ones for another few meals plus a good sized pile of small and ugly ones for peeling, boiling and baking as sweet potato casserole.  Yummy.  The other thing I pulled was the very last of the beets.  With a good number of beets in the frig and the ones I just pulled I was inspired to think of cold-weather beet recipes.  Borscht came to mind.  I've never made borscht but I've eaten a fair amount.  I was totally spoiled a couple of years ago when I went to a friend's house for a Christmas party and he had made borscht.  I learned some good tips from him.  Occasionally someone at work will make borscht and bring it work.  So I looked up recipes and recalled the lessons I learned from Mark, who made it for his Christmas party.  There are as many recipes for borscht as there are little Slavic babushkas.  There is Ukrainian borscht, Russian borscht, Polish borscht and now there is Tacketts Mill Farm borscht.  Otleechna! 

I took my beets, washed and peeled them and grated/shredded them by hand.  That was work, but I hope the extra effort and love translate into extra beety goodness in the borscht.  I also cut the large beets into small chunks because I like beets and the chunks add some texture.  I kept three or four small beets and threw them in whole.  I added sour kraut, a step I saw in a recipe on line, chunked up some small carrots, sliced up a large onion, added the heart of a celery, garlic from the garden, beef broth and sea salt.  It is simmering as I type this.  If it is bad I will be unhappy because I grew those beets myself and hate to waste food.  Mark told me "Borscht is like gumbo," he knows I came here from Louisiana and all good teachers put their lessons into context for their understudies, "you just build on the basics."  So, that is what I have done.  Mark had meat in his borscht.  I do not, at least not this time.  I have a large pot of this beet soup and will doubtless bring some to work for my coworkers, a couple of whom really know their borscht.  I don't think the Manischwitz family has anything to fear from my version just yet, but I guess it is possible I could become a beet soup billionaire if I hit just right.  This is America, after all.