borscht

There Will Be Borscht

short rib borsch

Recently I interviewed Dorie Greenspan on my Instagram Live and she talked about how she’s been cooking so much lately from cookbooks. I confessed that I’d fallen into a rut where I just keep making the same things over and over again: roast chicken with root vegetables, pasta, pork chops, pasta, soup, pasta. Did I mention pasta?

She urged me to take more chances on recipes that I’d never made before and when we finished I looked at all of the cookbooks in my collection that I hadn’t been using. If you know me at all, you’ll know that I’m guilty of buying cookbooks on a whim (see: the piles of cookbooks everywhere in our apartment) and the first one that caught my eye was the Kachka cookbook, winner of the 2018 Piglet tournament of cookbooks. I’ve had Kachka for two years and never cooked from it. I flipped it open and immediately landed on the recipe I knew I had to make: short rib borsch.

Summer Borscht

Veselka in the East Village is a New York institution; NYU students stumble in there late at night to sober up. During the day, it’s an eclectic mix of East Village hipsters and older Eastern Europeans. I first went with my graduate class at NYU and stuck to standard diner fare–a burger, a salad, something eggy, a waffle. Only recently, though, did I consume the fare that Veselka is known for: “Ukranian soul food” (and that’s according to their website.)

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