Soup

Cold days require warm comfort food and home-made soup fills the bill.  Our kids were raised on wonderful home-made soups that were never ever the same twice in a row.  Refrigerator soup, sometimes known as enthusiasm soup, started with anything that would serve as a base, and then everything in the refrigerator was enthusiastically dumped into it. The herbs and spices varied though I think China Lily soy sauce figured predominantly.

Tanya's soups are all home-made and are primarily vegetables with some meat boiled in it, such as chicken, for good measure.  There are several different names - borshch, summer borshch, she, soup (no name?) and one of my favourites, Solyanka.

Lingvo defines it as a spicy vegetable and meat soup.  Sol is salt so to me it is more salty soup. Tanya's is made more or less thusly:

Chopped up vegetables: potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, cabbage, whatever is handy. The onions and tomatoes are fried up a bit first in a very hot pan.  Everything is boiled together with chopped up ham.  Add lemon, rind and all, chopped up fine, black or green olives, halved, small pickled mushrooms and dill pickles chopped up fine.  Tanya added a little hot chili ketchup to this last batch, so I guess yo can experiment how you like  When it is just about done, throw in chopped fresh (or fresh frozen) dill weed (goes in all soups).  Serve with sour cream (is there any other way to serve Ukrainian soup?).

Two days ago, I made two loaves of banana bread which were slightly overbaked and therefore look like there was molasses in the mix.  Tastes pretty good anyhow.  This afternoon, I made johnny cake and Tanya made oatmeal raisin cookies.  My johnny cake recipe has sugar in it. When we were in Dnipro last week, we ate at an Italian restaurant (Il Primo, chain owned by TGI Fridays). Tanya's fish (salmon?) was served with a sauce of some kind on a thin slice of cornbread which had no sugar.  I need to find a similar recipe for both fish and cornbread on the net as she said it was the best lunch ever.