My homestay ended a couple of weeks ago now, and I’ve really been missing home-cooked food. On Monday, I finally decided to take action and attempt to make our group’s favorite Russian food: Borscht.

On Tuesday I looked up some recipes and a group of us headed out to Ashan, the grocery store near campus. We bought a ridiculous number of root vegetables, as well as a few other ingredients we needed, and brought it all back to the dorm’s kitchen.

Making borscht for ten people was even more exhausting than I expected. First, the beets had to be boiled for about an hour before they would be soft enough to cut up. While they were cooking, a few of us cut up vegetables.

As is generally the case with soup, there is no particular recipe that dictates how much of each ingredient to add, or what the result should taste like. We ended up working off two recipes: one, in Russian, was used for deciding how much to buy, and another, in English with nice illustrations, helped us figure out what order to cook things in.

When the beets were finished, we used the water they had boiled in as the soup’s broth. We tossed some sliced potatoes in and fried up some onions and carrots.

When the potatoes were soft, we added the beets, onions and carrots, some cabbage, tomatoes, garlic, salt, pepper, and peas. We were a little nervous because the result didn’t look much like the dark red borscht we were used to buying in restaurants, but as we worked on our second pot, we realized that the secret was in waiting: the longer the borscht sat, the redder it became.

When the soup was done, we cut up some bread and filled our bowls with borscht and sour cream. The soup could have used some more salt, and maybe it had a few too many potatoes in it, but it was certainly edible, and I had a great time trying out Russian cooking with friends.