Beet Blast!

The time has come, to give the world my recipe for BARSZCZ. That’s Polish for borscht (you can read about the variations on barszcz/borscht elsewhere).

Some background on my Borscht obsession.

People of non-Polish or Jewish descent never get excited when I talk about my fabulous borscht recipe, so I call it beetroot soup. But that doesn’t really get people excited either. So now I’m thinking about calling it BEET BLAST.

I’ve seriously been considering starting a company where I bottle up my special BEET BLAST and sell it as a miracle cure for colds and hangovers*.

Because, no joke, that is what it is. In the last year I have made up a big pot of BEET BLAST at least once a month, and I’ve only gotten sick once – and that was over in a day.

I originally tasted this soup when I was in Poland, land of endless tasty soups (including pickle soup). Just about every restaurant and bar mleczny offered the delicious red barszcz (pronounced badly by me as BAR-shuh-chuh). At train stations you could pay like a dollar and get a styrofoam cup filled with steaming red broth.

I loved it but didn’t even think about making it myself because I assumed there was some complicated soaking/extracting/fermenting process involved, and anyway I’d never eaten a beet before or held one in my hands so I had no inkling of how to cook with one.

Flash forward a couple years, and our beautiful, mad Polish director friend Luba is staying with us while she directs a play. I learned a lot from her but the most profound, simple thing I picked up was her approach to cooking. We would come home after a long, grueling night of rehearsal and whereas I might throw a frozen pizza in the oven, she would pull out lentils and carrots and celery and onions and toss things in a pot with water and before I’d even taken my shoes off she’d have a delicious, thick lentil stew bubbling on the stove ready to eat.

One day we had a party. I think we were barbecue-ing, and everyone came bearing six packs of beer and hot dogs. While we sat around the kitchen table gossiping and drinking beers, Luba calmly filled a gigantic stock pot with water and threw in carrots, celery, onion and freshly scrubbed beets. At the end of the night she cut lemons in half, squeezed them into the pot and announced that the barszcz was done. Now, I don’t remember how it tasted that night – but I do remember the next morning when we all woke up and stumbled into the kitchen. Luba ladled rich ruby red broth into mugs and passed them around, saying, “Here. Polish cure for hangover.” OH MY GOD. It restored order to the world.

So, flash forward some more. It is a week before my solo show opens and my throat is sore and I can feel sickness coming on. I need my voice for the show. I panic. I am pacing the aisles of the grocery store late at night throwing garlic and oranges and cough drops into my basket when I wander past some beets in the produce section. The memory of Luba’s delicious soup comes floating back to me, and so I buy them and take them home and boil them up in a big pot of water. I squeeze in some lemon, and then I drink the broth.

People, I have tried the various “cures” for colds – popping vitamin c, gulping cayenne, lemon and honey in hot water, chicken soup with ten cloves of garlic. I’ve always gotten a cold anyway. But after I drank down this elixir, the oncoming cold was GONE. And this despite a punishing schedule of tech rehearsals and neverending singing!

So, I am a believer. I am a proselytizer, even though I know that preaching about something is the surest way to turn people away from it. I can’t help it. I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW ABOUT BEET BLAST.

Here is my simple, lazy, very untraditional** recipe for…

DELICIOUS MAGICAL BEET BLAST

+ Fill up a big old pot with water and set it to boiling on the stove.

+ Take 2-3 beets. Scrub them clean, and if they’re especially gnarly, peel them. Cut them into quarters and toss them into the pot. The water will immediately turn dark pink or red… if it’s more pink than red I might add another beet.

+ If the beets have greens attached, wash those and toss them in as well.

+ Chop up onion, carrot and celery. One each is good, but if you have less it’s ok. I just use whatever I have on hand. And don’t chop them pretty – you won’t be eating the vegetables themselves.

+ If you have parsley, throw in a generous handful. And throw in a clove or two of garlic.

Honestly, that’s about it. If you’ve got other bits of vegetables around you want to throw in – potatoes, turnips, mushrooms – anything you’d add to a regular vegetable stock will taste great.

+ Let it simmer on the stove for at least an hour. The house will smell so healthy and delicious. Then take a lemon, cut it in half and squeeze both halves into the broth. You can use lime in a pinch, though I don’t think the flavors mesh quite as well. Taste it – you may need to add more lemon.

+ Add salt and pepper. And then you can either drain out the mushy used up vegetables (saving the broth, of course!) or just let them sit in the bottom of the pot while you ladle out the broth. Luba said if you leave them there the flavor will get more intense each day. But some people get kind of grossed out seeing the vegetable parts floating around in there.

What I do nowadays is make a big old pot of this stuff, freeze half the broth and drink the rest over the next 2-3 days. Then you’ve got some on hand if you get sick and can’t get out of bed.

* This will fit in nicely with my kindergarten classroom/karaoke lounge/therapeutic dance party business.

** Supposedly the traditional Polish way to make this is to let the soup naturally ferment and sour (as opposed to adding the lemon). I’m not badass enough to try that yet, though.