Nearly every week for the past few months I prepare a big pot of borscht. The ingredients are cheap and easy to come by here: a huge bag each of carrots, onions, potatoes and beetroots cost only a few dollars and last a few weeks. If you have a few dollars left in your budget, pretty much any cut of porc should be cheap and easy to chop up into small stewing cubes. Garlic also goes great in the recipe.

Making the soup doesn't require much skill, and honestly just takes a bit of time and prep work. Dice the onion without getting too picky about the size of your pieces. Peel the potatoes and dice them too, try to make the cubes somewhat similar in size. Chop up your meat (if you have some) in cubes of a similar size to your potatoes. Peel the carrots and grate them. Peel the beetroots and grate them. Don't get too picky on quantities, but I usually follow the following ratio of ingredients: 2 parts beetroot, 2 parts carrot, 2 parts potatoes, 1 part onion, 1 part meat.

Finally actually cook the food. Boil the meat first and watch the water as it starts to boil, you'll see some foam rise on the surface of the water, and you want to remove as much of it as possible. After boiling the meat for an hour, you can add the potatoes and beetroots to the pot. In a pan, cook your onions first until they're translucent. Throw in some crushed garlic if you want at this point; if you do make sure to add the next ingredient only after you can smell the fragrance from the garlic cooking. Finally add the carrots and cook them until the carrots are softened,it should take a couple minutes, but don't cook them to the point of burning them. Once finished add them to the pot.

Let the whole mixture simmer until the potatoes are soft, and don't feel bad for cooking it for longer. Add salt to taste and add a spoonful of sour cream to your bowl before eating.

I'm sure there are some far more traditional ways to make this soup, but I have no Slavic roots and just really enjoy this recipe that resembles borscht, so I call it borscht.