From Russia with Beets and the Spiders from Mars

I borscht! Then I ate it!

My cousin's wife gave me some canned beets for Christmas--it was to give some physical weight to a bag containing gift cards to Barnes and Noble, Regal Cinemas, and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. I didn't quite know what to do with the beets until I watched Battleship Potemkin and decided to google this borscht stuff people were mutinying over. And lo, the chief ingredient was beets!

The old fashioned way is to make it with beef broth, but there were several vegetarian recipes online, most of which seemed to require two hours. I went with this one, which required only about half an hour and is probably rather far from the real thing, but, sorry, two hours just exceeds the amount of time I'm willing to give to soup. This is why I'll never be a cook, I guess.

Anyway, I used low sodium vegetable broth instead of vegetable stock--I'm still rather fuzzy on the difference between stock and broth--and I omitted carrots because I just didn't feel like carrots. Also, of course, I didn't use sour cream and I used some pre-grated black pepper instead of freshly grated which I'm sure made so much difference.

I'm pretty sure I fucked up, and I'm developing theories as to precisely how. I think the problem is that there was too much water with the beets from the can when I sautéed them--I'd dumped out most of the water first, but I guess not enough of it, because I don't think the olive oil quite evaporated and/or soaked into the vegetables properly. Now that I've been bitten by the borscht bug, I may try this again but with fresh beets.

The oily, beety result of my endeavour wasn't so bad, and very good to dip bread in. The first serving gave me a stomach ache, so to-day I separated the hard stuff from the liquid, heated them up, and just used the liquid to dip bread in and ate the soft, abused vegetables by themselves. It was good.

Okay, enough with grossing you out. Here's last night's spider in my bathroom;

The camera somehow translated the contrast of lighting from my flashlight and the bathroom light to make the spider on the shower curtain look like a spider on the surface of lace Mars.