Recovery Journal. Healing Borscht

It’s not easy keeping Jon off his foot. Luckily the special “boot” they gave him makes it hard to walk.

We took a 20-minute drive yesterday to Hoosick Falls for a pretzel (which they were sold out of) and got apples and squash at the Moses Farm Stand.  Jon stayed in the car but when we got home he sat outside in the sunshine for a while reading.

I think I must have been channeling Jon’s grandma, Minnie Cohen because I got the urge to make Borscht and I rarely get the urge to cook.  When he was a kid and got sick, he always went to his grandma’s house.

I already had the beets and got a recipe online.  But the soup turned out awful. I fed some of it to the chickens and put the rest in the compost bin.

I was ready to give up but then Jon looked up a recipe for Jewish Borscht, which was completely different from the recipe I was using.  It’s so simple just beats, water, a little sugar (I’ll use honey) lemon, salt pepper a potato or two and of course a dollop of sour cream.  I was annoyed that I spent all that time yesterday making bad borscht,  so I kinda wanted to get it right.

It would take me five minutes to get to the Farmer’s Market which closed in ten minutes.   I made it in time and Jamie, the organic farmer, had six pounds of beets left, I bought two.

When I got home I sat on the couch next to Jon, held a beet in each hand, closed my eyes, and asked for Minnie’s help.  After all, I was making the soup for her “Johnny.”

“I heard the words Beets saved us.” I said to Jon when I opened my eyes.  I imagined Minnie as a child in Russia with only beets to eat during a long winter.

So later today I’ll cook up two pounds of beets and hope for the best.

Jon’s still resting and putting ice on his foot, but not as rigorously as we had been doing.   He’s learning how to use his sleep apnea machine and tomorrow we’ll go to his foot surgeon and see what comes next. We can’t take the bandage off his foot so we don’t really know what going on, but it seems to be healing well from what we can sense.

So things are looking up and if all goes well, with a little help from Minnie Cohen, we’ll have Borscht for dinner.

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