Borscht perfection

This was my baseline, the recipe my sister acquired from the one vegetarian she found in Russia.

I'd made this recipe once before. What I remember from the last attempt was that an entire head of cabbage is way way way too much cabbage. Perhaps Russian cabbages are smaller? Or it was a Savoy? But I liked the separate cooking of the soup pot and the beets - the vegetables retained their own color - at least initially - better than the method I'd taken in the past, to boil everything in a pot. In the past I've also shied away from using tomato paste, and flavored the soup with apple cider vinegar. I had to buy tomato paste in order to make this soup and I almost always have a huge bottle of apple cider vinegar at home, which usually factors into my cooking decisions

In any case, this was my second farm share cabbage... and it was pretty big. I'd already decided to make cabbage with tomatoes and sour cream, which needed 6 cups of cabbage, which was honestly only about half of what I had. I shredded the cabbage, measured out the 6 cups, and then used the remaining cabbage in the borscht. This is also kind of the reason I ended up staying up so late cooking on Tuesday - I started the borscht and then chopped the cabbage for the other dish and then, since the cabbage was chopped, I felt inclined to cook it right away.

I did have one kind of large shot of vodka while cooking the borscht. It was not as delicious as the borscht.

Alterations to the original recipe:

* I used a little less onion, maybe one? one and a quarter?

* olive oil

* parsley was my herb

* more than the equivalent of a can of beans

* no sugar - and can i just say, it really does not need sugar.

i've been eating it with sour cream, and having it for lunch with a tofu-mustard sandwich, which tastes infinitely better than it sounds.