We absolutely have to start with borshch! There is a scary saying, speculating that no Ukrainian girl will be able to get married, if she does not know how to prepare borshch. And oh my – we all make sure we do!
This traditional soup, made out of beet root and up to 20 other ingredients, is a staple dish in every Ukrainian family. We love our borshch with all the depth of our Ukrainian hearts – hot and cold, fresh and stale, for lunch or for breakfast, as a meal or even as a healing medicine against the winter colds. Every housewife has its own secret version of borshch, and no restaurant trial can ever compete with the real, steaming hot home-made borshch.
Traditionally borshch recipe is a basic stir-fry of grated beet root with tomatoes, added to a generous soup of vegetables – onions, carrots, fresh or pickled cabbage, peppers, and whatever else is available from our house garden. For the true state-of-art samples of this dish you have to head to the hidden-away villages of Carpathian Mountains, where borshch is cooked not on the gas stove, but is left to simmer for hours in the coziness of wooden oven. Pour it in the clay pot, drip in a spoon of fresh sour cream, snack up on a garlic-sprinkled pampushky and you’ll be able to understand what the true Ukrainian heaven looks like!
