Babula's Russian Borscht (Meatless Version)

Ingredients:

1 small cabbage
2 medium-sized beets
3 carrots
1 can white beans
1 can tomato paste (small cans)
1 onion, diced
1 potato, peeled and diced
2 beef flavor soup cubes
salt
pepper
paprika
water
oil
Sour cream if desired


Directions:

Well in advance, and wearing clothes you hate, scrub and boil beets (skin on) until soft, approx 2-3 hours (!). Peel and shred beets, shred carrots, and shred cabbage (use a food processor if you have one for all of this shredding)

Heat a small amount of oil in a heavy soup pot. Sautee together the carrots, diced onion, and diced potato, until soft.

Add approximately 3 liters of water, bring to a boil. Add soup cubes and can of beans, allow to boil again.

Add 1/2 can of tomato paste, mix well, bring back to a boil

Add cabbage, boil until cabbage feels soft

Add paprika, black pepper, and salt to taste.

Add beets, allow to boil about 5 more minutes.

Taste borscht and adjust seasonings as desired.

Serve hot, top with sour cream.

Tastes even better after a couple of days.

Globbing for Tzedakah

Making friends as an adult can be really difficult. About a year ago, I met someone who it seems like I've been friends with since I was a kid. She's dangerously funny, and our birthdays are 4 days apart. And we share snacks. Those sound like all of the guidelines I used for friendship circa third grade.

She's running a tzedakah project that she describes very clearly on her own glob, so if you haven't yet read about it, you ought to read it in her own words.

For my part, I wanted to get a little poetic and write two successive haiku that incorporate the letters G-L-O-B. I had to take my liberties a bit because haiku is traditionally done in 3 lines, with a 5-7-5 syllable sequence.
My apologies to my poetic friend E, and also to Princess D.


GLOB-Ku

Goal of one hundred
Little fragments form the whole
Offered Bountifully

Giving it away
Lets us hold on to ourselves
Only a Bit more