Clear Beet Soup--Polish Christmas Eve Borshch

I should not need any particular reason to post another beet recipe; there is always at least one among my top-ten posts. But for me as Polish, Christmas is a wonderful opportunity to share a recipe for this clear vegetarian borshch, possibly, the most famous Polish soup.

Until today I have never cooked this Christmas borshch myself. My mother has always been cooking it for us, either in Poland or here when she was visiting us. The Christmas Eve savory dishes (all of them vegetarian) were her specialty and I made the sweets. Unfortunately, this year she decided that this long trip overseas was too tiring for her, so the burden of keeping up with the tradition fell entirely on me.

But, on the positive side, it also became an opportunity for me finally to learn how to make borshch, especially that this is the most liked soup at me home. After a couple of phone calls, and making sure that I got all the ingredients and steps right, I got it done. And it turned out that it could not be easier.

There are many ways to prepare borshch and many families have different traditions of doing it. In our home, for example, we did not add dried porcini to it, like some other families do. During Christmas we eat cabbage with porcini or serve borshch with pastry stuffed with mushrooms, so it always seemed too much to put mushrooms also in the borshch. The other reason is that my son, who loves borshch, also hates mushrooms, so naturally I need to avoid putting them in the dishes he eats.

The most characteristic thing about this soup is that beets are not cooked, so all their nutritional values are preserved and the soup has the most beautiful and intensive purple color.
Also some of the spices used make it taste unique. Borshch is usually served in special bowls with pierogi, or accompanied by small, stuffed pastry. On occasions other than Christmas Eve it can also be made in a non-vegetarian version, for instance as a beef-beet broth and served with beef-stuffed pierogi. But my most favorite version is this Christmas Eve vegetarian borshch.

Polish Christmas Eve Borshch

Ingredients:
3-4 medium carrots, peeled,
1/4 medium celery root, peeled,
1/2 parsley root, if available, peeled
1/2 medium leek, washed thoroughly in between leaves,
6 medium beets,
vegetable bullion (optional, only if your vegetables do not release enough taste on their own),
2 garlic cloves, minced
3-4 tbsp vinegar,
2 tbsp sugar,
1/2 tsp ground caraway,
2 bay leaves,
4 all spice,
4 black peppercorns,
5 whole cloves,
4 prunes (optional),
1 tbsp salt and black pepper to taste,
1 tbsp fresh chopped dill (optional).

Preparation:
1. In a large pot bring to boil 8 cups of water with salt, bay leaves, peppercorns, and allspice.
Add carrot, celery root, parsley root, and leek, and cook for about 40 minutes, until vegetables are soft. Try the stock and if it does not have much taste you may add bullion or extra vegetable stock.
2. Peel off the beets and cut into 1/4 inch-thick slices. Add them to the pot with vegetable stock. Bring to boil but let it boil only for about a minute or two. Turn off the heat. Add caraway, ground black pepper, cloves, garlic, prunes, sugar, and balsamic vinegar.

3. Taste the soup--it should be sweet and sour, but also spicy from pepper and garlic. You may add an extra tablespoon of vinegar or sugar depending on the sweetness of the beets and carrots.
4. Cover the pot and let it stand over night to infuse all the aromas.

Reheat borshch before serving it, again without boiling it for too long. Add dill, and serve it with pierogi or small pastry.

Speculoos Cookies--from Belgium for Christmas

I have not heard about Speculoos until I visited my friend in Brussels two years ago. She insisted that I take home a heavy jar of that typical Belgium specialty for kids to try. It looked pretty much like crushed cookies mixed with caramel.

Speculoos for Belgium is what Nutella is for Italians, and peanut butter for Americans--a spread that is served on anything you like, mostly bread. It is creamy but at the same time almost crunchy with the buttery caramel taste, enhanced by some spices.

I did not expect to be impressed much with Speculoos. But when I tried it, I became highly addicted to it, especially with a sweet tooth like mine. I alternated with my son making frequent trips to the kitchen cabinet where Speculoos was hidden and three days later the whole jar was gone.

I looked at the list of ingredients trying to discover the secret of its taste but there was nothing special in it but regular cookie ingredients. I searched different sources to get the right recipe. All the recipes I found were pretty similar. The only difference is that some used egg, some did not. Some recipes called for light brown sugar, other for dark brown sugar. Recently, one was also shared in The Washington Post Wednesday food section.

This week I volunteered to prepare two dozen cookies for my son's Christmas cookie party at school. Instead of making typical American cookies, which I am not good at, I decided to try the WP recipe for Speculoos cookies. My choice was also very seasonally appropriate: in Belgium, they make these cookies on the 6th of December for St. Nicolas and serve them trough the entire Christmas season.

Speculoos cookies are traditionally very thin and either square or animal-shaped, but it is hard to make them very thin at home. I made them about 1/8 inch thick and used Christmas cookie cutters to make different shapes. I also used an advice from the Washington Post recipe and rolled out the dough between wax paper sheets which made working with that pretty sandy dough much easier.

Speculoos Cookies

Ingredients:
2 sticks plus two tbsp (250 g) of good quality butter, room temperature,
1 and 1/2 cup dark brown sugar,
4 and 1/2 cups sifted unbleached, all purpose flour,
1 tsp baking powder,
3 tbsp milk,
1/2 egg (or no egg at all but add extra tbsp of milk),
1 tsp ground clove,
1 tsp ground cinnamon,
1/2 tsp ground star anise,
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg,
1/2 tsp salt,

Preparation:
1. Beat butter with sugar in a stand-up mixer on medium speed for about 3 minutes, until smooth. Stop the mixer a couple of times and scrape the walls of the bowl.
2. Beat egg with milk in a separate bowl and add to the butter mixture. Run mixer for about 2 minutes, or until all ingredients are combined.
3. In a large bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and spices. Add them to the mixture, about a cup at a time, while running the mixer on a low speed. Let incorporate each dose in between, scraping again the walls in between. The dough would be kind of lumpy and sandy but not too sticky.
4. Place the dough on a working surface. Knead gently to form one big ball. Divide it in half.
5. Cut four large pieces of waxing paper about 20 inches long. Place half of the dough in between two wax paper sheets and roll it out with a rolling pin into a rather thin square. Leave the dough between the wax paper sheets. Place both of them on top of each other on a cookie sheet and refrigerate, preferably over night or at least for two hours.
6. Preheat oven to 370F.
7. Grease two or three large cookie sheets with butter.
8. Place the first piece of a dough on a working surface. Remove wax paper from the top of the dough and cut out cookies with the cookie cutter (or a sharp knife, if you do rectangles).

9. Using a thin spatula, transfer them to the baking sheet. Bake for about 12-15 minutes, until brown. Cool them on a wire rack.

Serve plain or coated with melted good quality Belgium chocolate.

Sour Cabbage Sautéed with Mushrooms

Sour cabbage is a typical winter vegetable. In Polish cuisine there are at least three types of dishes featuring it as a main ingredient: sour cabbage soup, sour cabbage salad, and many versions of sour cabbage cooked or, rather sautéed, with dried mushrooms, including our famous "bigos".

But I have just realized that, so far, I have not posted any sour cabbage recipes. One reason for that is that my favorite sour cabbage-based dish (sour cabbage sautéed with dried porcini mushrooms), which we serve for Christmas Eve, requires a lot of dried porcinis, which may not be affordable here in the US, unless you have picked up your porcinis yourself (like my friend from Bethesda, who finds porcinis in his backyard).

So, if someone asked me about a sour cabbage dish I would probably recommend this simple modern dish based on sour cabbage and white mushrooms, which in Poland we often pair with cabbage. It is an easy dish and requires only widely available ingredients.

There is a long-standing tradition of eating sour cabbage in France, especially in Alzace (choucroute) and Germany (sauerkraut) and also among Jewish people. However, I noticed recently an increased interest in sour cabbage beyond this traditional circle. I suppose this is as much for its rather exotic sour taste (at least for those who did not grow up eating it) as for its great health value.

The lactic acid bacteria (lactobacilli) play a key role in the transformation of cabbage into sour cabbage and are also important anti-cancer agents. The importance of lactobacilli has been acknowledged by modern nutrition science, and many food items are now enriched with them. They can sometimes cause a strong digestive reaction in some people, but they are also responsible for the very low rate of digestive tract cancer, especially colon cancer, among the Polish population.

Those who are curious how cooked sour cabbage tastes, may wish to begin with this sample dish.

Sauerkraut saute with mushrooms

Ingredients:
2 cups sour cabbage (look for it under "sauerkraut" in your local supermarket),
2 cups chopped onion,
2 cups finally sliced white cap mushrooms,
salt and freshly ground pepper,
1 tsp caraway seeds,
4-6 tbsp vegetable oil.

Preparation:
1. In a frying pan heat the oil and fry the onions for about 5 minutes, until transparent.
2. Add mushrooms and fry together until the mushrooms become slightly gold.
3. Add to the pan cabbage, caraway seeds, freshly ground pepper, and mix everything thoroughly.
4. Turn down the heat to "low" and sautée cabbage for 20-30 minutes, until it is soft.

This cabbage tastes best served with water boiled or roasted potatoes. It can also be used to stuff savory pastry and pierogi.