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36 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ГРУДЕНЬ 2016 Chambord Borshch Once upon a time, many years ago, I decided to host Sviat Vechir at my house. It was the year my mother passed away, and I wanted to make things nice for my father and honor mama’s memory. The guest list also included my sister Hanka and her husband Adrian, my cousin Ulana and her husband Jim, my Teta Marusia, my nephew Alex, and a couple of friends. So I cleaned house and started working on the menu, which included a lovely “kholodets” (fea- turing white fish from a jar and canned peas and carrots in gelatin), holubtsi, varenyky, vushka, and kutia (all purchased from the good ladies at St. Mi- chael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church or at the Christ- mas bazaar held at the UECC), and a kolach pur- chased from a local Jewish deli. I passed on the uz- var (mostly because I figured “solodke” would walk into the house with one of the guests). I’m not sure what possessed me, but I de- cided to make the borshch all by myself from a rec- ipe I found in one of the three cookbooks I own: an old notebook of my grandmother’s recipes inherited from my mother; a spiral-bound book called Se- lected Ukrainian Recipes for Winter Season pub- lished in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1978 by UNWLA Branch 12; and an old Betty Crocker book that my ex-husband insisted on leaving with me because he didn’t want me to starve (I still consult the recipe on page 26 whenever I make meatloaf). Anyway, my borshch recipe was a combina- tion of the recipe from babtsia and the one from UNWLA Branch 12, along with something I got from my friend Chrystyna Prokopovych, who hap- pens to be an excellent cook. I had told her about my plans to make borshch, and she was kind enough not to snicker or fall over. Instead, she presented me with a small bottle of something called Krakus, as- suring me that it would add some zing and pizazz to the borshch. I thanked her, shoved it into my pan- try, and forgot all about it. A day or two before my great culinary ad- venture, I went to the supermarket and bought lots of beets and whatever else my babtsia’s recipe called for. Then I found a huge pot and set about chopping the beets and all the other things listed in the recipe. Having finished the chopping, I tossed everything (including water) into the pot and started cooking. Several hours later, I assumed the borshch must be pretty much well done, so I turned off the stove and waited for it to cool down enough to taste my creation. But when I finally tasted it, I almost gagged. Waaaaaaaaay too sweet, like somebody had dumped a gallon of honey into the pot. So now what? AHA, I thought. I’ll try that Krakus stuff Chrystia gave me. So I went rooting into the pantry and there it was, hiding behind a box of chocolate pudding mix. It was a tiny little bottle (about 1/2 the size of those little bottles of vanilla extract you can get at any supermarket) and my borshch pot was huge. I forgot (or didn’t pay attention to) what Chrystia had said about how much to use and just used what I thought was common sense: Huge Pot + Tiny Bottle = Perfect Solution! And so I poured the entire contents of the little bottle into the big pot. Big mistake! The stuff now tasted like someone had dumped a bucket of vinegar into it. NOW WHAT? By this time, it's 11 p.m. and the supermarket is already closed and the company is coming tomorrow and I'm too tired and depressed to start this from scratch, so maybe there's some way to salvage the situation . . . . So I start looking through my pantry (which is jam- packed with stuff I don't even recognize . . . and lo and behold I spot a bottle of Chambord on the pan- try floor! Talk about your Christmas miracle! So I think to myself, “SELF, this is going to work. It's the right color. It's sweet. And most im- portant it has alcohol, so maybe it'll mess with peo- ple's brains just enough so it fools their taste buds.” So I threw in a shot-glass of Chambord and it tasted better. So I threw in another shot-glass of Chambord and it tasted better than before. So I threw in a third shot-glass of Chambord and it tasted so absolutely wonderful I decided I should quit while I was ahead and still sober. And the next day, the company came and we started Sviat Vechir with my borshch and every- one was shocked out of their minds that I had made this all by myself and even asked for another bowl. I was basking in the praise until someone said, "Can you give me the recipe?" Yeah right. Here it is, step by step: 1. Screw up big pot of borshch and don't realize that it's screwed up until 11 p.m. the day before you're expecting 10 people for Sviat Vechir. 2. Try to rescue the situation by adding ingredients you never heard of but your great cook friend gave you (make sure to ignore whatever instructions are on the bottle or whatever advice your friend gave you). If this doesn't work, 3. Add 3 shot-glasses of Chambord. Is this how Betty Crocker got her start? - tsc
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