Winter soup and winter salad

The rest of the East coast was buried in snow, so we figured we should eat something warm and satisfying as if we were caught in the snowstorm too.  As a fun variation on wild rice soup, we tried one with squash and sausage.  ib also made a wonderful salad with cabbage and raw beets that we could not get enough of.

Roasted beets, goat cheese, horseradish, caviar

If you roast some beets ahead of time, this is a simple and very good appetizer.  We roasted medium-small beets in the oven, at 400 °F for 90–120 minutes, wrapped in aluminum foil.  We removed them and sliced them, and served roasted beet slices on bread, either with farmers’ market goat cheese, or with a small dollop of creamy horseradish; both were great pairings.  We also had caviar, so we put caviar (salmon roe) on buttered bread, Russian-style.  The butter balances salmon roe nicely.  Next time, we’ll see if we can use Russian black bread!

We heart beets

Inspired by some beet risotto recipes, we threw together a hearty, fall, one-pot-meal.

The Vegetable-Dessert Challenge

cea and I always manage to get ourselves into exciting cooking messes, this time involving some intriguing vegetable-inspired cake recipes — so, we had a bake-off.

cold borscht

What better thing to do with beets on a hot summer day?  We followed the recipe from Anya von Bremzen’s Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook, which I wholeheartedly recommend; it also has a great hot borscht recipe. We made some modifications to the cold borscht recipe to make it more like the cold borscht (actually, svekol’nik) made by ib’s great-grandmother.