Eat More Veggies recipe: hippie vegan roasted borscht-stew

The weather's been nippy around here for the past week or so--okay, it's nippy only by Southern California standards, but there were actually frost advisories the other night for some areas, and that's nippy enough for me. Anyway--that, and a call for a Christmas Day potluck item, turned my thoughts to borscht.

I've read that in some places in Eastern Europe, borscht is simply the word for soup. There are other places where borscht has to have beets in it, still others where beets are optional. Seems like every region and ethnic group has its own variant. As usual, some nice person at Wikipedia has explained a bunch of this.

In my 20s I became enamored of hippie-style borscht with lots and lots of stuff in it, such as the recipe in the original Moosewood Cookbook (which stained and battered book I still own; that version is apparently out of print). The following recipe starts with the Moosewood recipe but then takes off in a whole other direction. Roasting the beets, onion, and garlic gives my version added umami/caramelization umph, and skimping on the liquid results in something much more like a hot cooked salad/stew than a soup.

This recipe makes a huge vatful of the stuff, but that's okay; this is definitely the kind of dish that's even better the next day.

Ingredients:

• 8 fresh beets, whole, 2.5 inches in diameter or less; if they came with greens intact, remove, leaving an inch worth of stems (be sure to save the greens for some other dish)
• 1 large red onion, peeled, trimmed, and cut into large chunks
• 1 head garlic--pull as much skin off it as possible while still leaving the head intact
• 1 medium head of cabbage, cored, quartered, sliced into thin shreds
• 4 medium red potatoes, quartered, cut into thin slices (do not peel; keep slices submerged in cold water until ready to use)
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 1 large can whole peeled tomatoes, deseeded and drained--reserve juice
• 5 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in a cup of hot water for 1/2 hour, then sliced thinly--reserve soaking liquid
• 1 tbsp fresh dillweed, minced
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
• 2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
• olive oil as needed
• salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg F.
2. Give onions, beets, and garlic a light coating of olive oil. Place on lightly greased rimmed baking sheet, keeping beets separate from onions and garlic, and roast in oven. Remove onion and garlic after about 30 minute or when the onion is well-browned and the garlic very soft.  Keep roasting the beets until their skins rub off relatively easily. Rub those skins off while they're still warm, quarter the beets, and slice thinly.
3. Squeeze all the garlic out of its remaining skins and keep with the onion.
4. In a very large soup pot over medium-low heat, sweat the carrots and celery in a little olive oil with some salt, until the veggies soften up and release some liquid. Add the shiitakes and the roasted onion and garlic; saute for a few minutes. Add the mushroom soaking liquid, stock, wine vinegar, potatoes, beets, tomatoes, dill, caraway, and a generous grind of pepper. Stir well to blend, cover, and let it gently come up to a simmer.
5. Gently fold in all the cabbage, cover, and let cook until the cabbage has just gotten soft, still retaining a little crunch. Add reserved tomato juice as needed to not-quite-cover the vegetables. Cover and bring back to a simmer again, It's done when the potato slices are just cooked through.

Serve hot, warm, or cold. You can garnish it with a little sour cream or plain yogurt, or just with more fresh minced dill. Great with thick slices of chewy crusy dark bread, the more artisanal the better. Happy holidays!