Sorry for the ugly pic, what's important is the recipe.

Through years of experimentation I have created the ultimate (according to my tastes) red borscht recipe. If you've never had it, it's a slightly sweet beet soup that you can customize in endless ways, but it typically has meat or beans and cabbage. It's a good meal for any season, extremely cheap, very healthy, and beets are good for your liver, so you should try it. It takes around 2-3 hours to cook but most of that's just letting it simmer and occasionally adding crap to the pot.

Ingredients

1. 1-2.5 lb cartilaginous red meat, ideally with bone (A big skin-on pork shank is my ideal cut, braised pork skin tastes great and thickens the broth. Can sub meat for dark kidney or cannellini beans) - precut stew meat works but you're paying more for someone else to do something that takes a couple extra mins of work

2. 3 medium or 4 small red beets (generally the smaller the sweeter, and ones with stalks still attached tend to taste better)

3. 4 medium cloves garlic

4. 1 large onion or 2 small

5. 1 gigantic carrot, 2 regular grocery store carrots, or 3 farmer's market/upscale grocery carrots

6. 1 can tomato paste

7. dash of white or white wine vinegar (be careful)

8. small fistful of flat leaf parsley

9. 2 medium bay leaves or one large

10. liberal amount of marjoram to taste

11. about a tsp of mexican oregano to taste (optional)

12. about a tsp of paprika to taste

13. half a white cabbage

14. chicken stock, 2 chicken stock cubes, or water

15. black pepper and salt to taste

16. white sugar or 2 prunes (optional)

Serve with:

• sturdy bread like a baguette

• dill

• sour cream, smetana, cream cheese, etc.

Directions

1. Cut the onion in half and dice one half; set the other half aside

2. Mince garlic

3. If you bought a whole cut of meat, you can process it into pieces ahead of time or simmer it first, then pull it out if you're lazy. That'll increase cook time though

4. Heat up your largest stock pot on the stovetop at about medium heat (I usually let the fat from the cut render but if yours doesn't have a lot of exposed fat then add some oil. Lard highly recommended if you're using beef). Add the meat and stir around for a few mins.

5. Add onions and sweat for a couple mins, then add bay leaves and garlic and sweat for a couple more mins. Make sure not to brown anything, the mallard reaction ruins the clean flavor

6. Add tomato paste, stir around for a couple mins, then add paprika and stir for a few secs until the paprika smell diminishes. The timing for these first few steps isn't important due to the aforementioned mallard reaction note.

7. Add stock/water with bullion/water and a dash of vinegar along with marjoram, parsley, and oregano.

8. Simmer for at least an hour, though it'll take longer if you're removing the meat and cutting it into pieces during the cooking process (it took the shank in this round about 1.5 hrs). You want the meat to be somewhat pliable but not super soft yet so that the pieces don't dissolve into pulled pork

9. Meanwhile, peel beets and cut each of them into halves. Divide the halves and cut half into small, thin pieces or throw into food processer and cut the other half into rough cubes or matchsticks (you could do one or the other but having both makes the texture more interesting)

10. Throw the beets into the pot

12. About 30 mins after the beets have been added, taste the broth. If your beets are really shit then you can add sugar or prunes here to sweeten it . Otherwise adjust your salt, spices, vinegar, etc. if you need to

13. Meanwhile, cut carrots into matchsticks or shreds or throw into food processor and cut the reserved half of the onion once through the middle, then crosswise into thin slivers

14. Toss the carrots and onion into the pot after the beets have been in there for 40-60 mins

15. Dice the cabbage half into squares or cut in small thin slivers.

16. Add cabbage to pot after carrots and onion have been in there for about 15 mins

17. Cook soup for 10 more mins, adjust to taste again if you need to

18. Serve with dill (can sub parsley), sour cream or w/e, and bread