A couple of weeks ago, a dear friend delivered freshly picked beets, wax beans, and potatoes from her farm garden. This was my trigger to make Borscht.

A Welcome Delivery

Borscht is a hearty beet soup that I learned to love when hubs and I moved to a town with many people of Ukrainian descent. My Mom was a wonderful cook, and made a variety of homemade soups, but this was one I had never seen prepared in our home.

Many years later, Mom told me that she absolutely loved borscht, but didn’t ever make it because my Dad wouldn’t eat it. He told her that his mother made it when he was a boy and he couldn’t stomach it because of the colour. What a guy! With a dollop of sour cream and some fresh dill stirred in, Borscht is among the most flavourful of the homemade soups.

When I learned that Mom loved borscht, it became tradition for me to make a big potful every fall and to take her some.

I don’t follow a recipe, so each batch is a little different but I haven’t had a failure yet (if my Mom says it’s good, that’s my measurement of success).

Photo Note: A food photography course I took several years ago suggested to crop food photos quite tightly in order to feature the food vs everything going on around the food. Aside from the tight crop for my feature photo, I corrected the white balance (which was skewed by the range hood stove light), and I edited out some glare on the plate, using the Touch/Retouch app.

“The borscht held just the right amount of sweetness, the beets tender but still fresh and bright, finely diced pork giving it further flavor.”

Carla Laureano, The Saturday Night Supper Club