Lenten Borscht with Mushroom Dumplings

Ingredients:

• 
  Lenten Borscht
  3 beets
• 2 onions
• 1 carrot
• 1 small celery root
• 1 parsley root
• 1 kohlrabi stem (if you have small kohlrabi, like I did, take several of them)
• 2-3 bay leaves
• Sunflower oil
• Ground black pepper
• Allspice peppercorns
• Salt to taste
  
• 
  
  Mushroom Dumplings (“Small Ears”, “Vushka”)
  1 onion
• 2 oz of dried porcini
• All purpose flour, about 4 cups in total
• 1 cup of water
• Black peppercorns
• Sunflower oil
• Butter
• Salt to taste

How to prepare, step-by-step:

1. Prepare ingredients: choose ripe beets, dark red and sweet; dried porcini can be substituted with dried birch boletes, however I would not advice to use any other mushrooms — the taste won’t be the same. I should probably also mention what original recipe doesn’t include using kohlrabi, however I like it for this recipe:

   

2. Put dried porcini into a bowl with cold water (about 2-3 quarts) and let them soak for several hours. It is generally good idea to do that a night before if you are planning to cook lenten borscht on the morning:

   

3. Boil beets with skin-on till they are ready and set them aside:

   

4. Pour mushrooms and the liquid they were soaking in to the cooking pot, bring them to simmer over moderate heat and boil for about 1 hour till mushrooms are soft:

   

5. Drain the mushroom stock to the other cooking pot (you will need it later on) using colander and rinse mushrooms with cold water:

   

6. Mince boiled mushrooms in food processor or meat grinder, or if you don’t have any of those simply chop them finely with a knife (I’ve used meat grinder):

   

7. Warm up a skillet with sunflower oil over moderate heat. Skin all onions, set one aside, and chop the rest (I haven’t done a good job with onions this time: it is better to chop them into smaller pieces than I did on the photos). Fry chopped onions until they are soft and yellow:

   

8. Add a half of all fried onions to minced mushrooms:

   

9. Season with ground black pepper and salt to taste (it is good to make the stuffing a bit spicy because the rest of the dish has smooth taste) and mix. Stuffing for dumplings is ready, set it aside for now:

   

10. Now lets prepare dough for dumplings: put about 2 cups of all purpose flour to a bowl, dissolve 1 tea spoon of salt in a cup of cold water and pour water over the flour:

    

11. Mix flour with water together until you get a dough you can actually knead by hands, add more flour if needed (find here some tips on how to prepare dough for dumplings):

    

12. Cover dough with a plastic wrap and let it rest while you prepare vegetable broth for the borscht. For that fill a big cooking pot (about 5-6qts) with a water and bring it to boiling. Skin carrots, parsley and celery roots and slice them into pieces, cut the last onion into big pieces and add all those vegetables to the pot with boiling water:

    

13. Add 2-3 bay leaves and several peppercorns of allspice and let it all simmer together for about 10 mins:

    

14. Then skin kohlrabi, cut it into big pieces (I cut each of my small ones into 8 pieces) and add them to the cooking pot. Simmer vegetables together for about 1 hour, then turn the heat off:

    

15. While vegetable stock is being prepared let’s make dumplings. It is easier to deal with dough if you roll it on big wooden board. So take a big wooden board and powder it with flour, remove plastic wrap from the dough, powder dough with four and knead it several times to make sure it is soft and homogeneous:

    

16. Cut a quarter size piece of the dough and roll it very thin with a rolling pin (cover the rest of a dough with a plastic wrap to prevent it from drying):

    

    Cut rolled dough into diamond-shaped pieces with sides about 2” long with a knife:

    

17. Here is how you make a mushroom dumpling, take a dough piece:

    

    Set about ½ of tea spoon of a mushroom stuffing in the middle of the one dough square:

    

18. Stick opposite corners of dough square together:

    

19. Then stick together sides to form a triangle:

    

20. Pull left and right corners of the triangle to each other and press them together:

    

21. Repeat for the rest of the dough and stuffing:

    

22. By Ukrainian tradition a few dumplings in lenten borscht for the Christmas Eve dinner have black peppercorns instead of the mushroom stuffing. It is considered a good sign to eat such dumpling: the person who eats such dumpling will be lucky next year. So, if you want to support this tradition go ahead and make 1 or 2 dumplings with even amount of black peppercorns (7, 9, 11, whatever works better for you), make sure those dumplings don’t look smaller than others, add a bit of mushroom stuffing if needed:

    

23. Lay ready dumplings on the plate or wooden board powdered with flour so they don’t stick to each other:

    

24. Now it is a time to “assemble” the borscht: remove skin from the boiled beets, slice them into stripes or grate on the big slots (I prefer to slice), put into another big cooking pot:

    

25. Put a big colander above the cooking pot with beets and pour vegetable broth into it (make sure it isn’t too hot or beets can lose its color):

    

26. You will receive something like this:

    

27. Warm up the rest of the fried onions a bit and pour them to the cooking pot:

    

28. Now it is a time to add mushroom stock, you may want to filter the liquid you got from boiling mushrooms if you see any kind of sand in it (the way the dried mushrooms being prepared doesn’t allow them to be washed properly, it is why that can happen especially if the mushroom are home dried).

    Then start adding mushroom water cup by cup to the cooking pot with beets and vegetable broth. Taste borscht after each cup and stop at the point when taste of beets and vegetables are balanced enough with taste of mushrooms. Salt and season with ground black pepper to taste and warm it up (but make sure it doesn’t boil):

    

29. Bring water in another cooking pot to boil and salt it. Put dumplings to the boiling water and stir:

    

30. Wait until dumplings come to the surface and make sure water isn’t boiling too much:

    

31. After about one minute of boiling get dumplings out of the water with a skimmer:

    

32. Put cooked dumplings to the bowl and smear them with a butter:

    

33. Set several dumplings into the soup bowl:

    

34. Pour several ladles of vegetable and mushroom borscht, then it is ready to be served: