July is hot. So is borscht.

Making borscht? Put in the greens.

Hot soup in muggy summer. When the beets are ripe and you crave borscht, you sweat it out and make a double batch. I’m just finishing up the end of my almost unnaturally red leftovers. And I’m ready to make more.

This all started because lovely, leafy beets have come to us the last three weeks in our CSA share. If you’ve never subscribed to a “community-supported agriculture” farm, look into it. For $30 a week (give or take) and the effort it takes to drive to the drop-off point, you tap into the fruits of your local portion of earth. Whatever ripens in a given week, you deal with. Even if it means sweating over a pot of soup.

“Dealing” is not always easy when, say, the green onions start arriving in droves. One can only use so many in a given year, and several have faded to brown fronds in my vegetable drawer since the boxes began to arrive in May.

Sometimes the food riches I haven’t planned on make me feel a little like Barbara Kingsolver, the activist-author who spent a whole year eating absolutely nothing but foods available within a certain radius of her home in southwestern Virginia and then wrote about it in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. August of that year, she could hardly turn around in her house with every available table, counter, sink, bucket and floor space covered with the tomatoes from too many vines planted in April.

So back to the borscht and why I don’t mind it when the beets start to arrive. I think it might be the deep, blood-red color. Or maybe the rooty flavor. Or beet chunks you can sink your teeth into. Many epicures prefer to eat it cold. I like the feeling of a good sweat on a hot day.

I make my Borscht fast, light and easy. No mutton. No meat at all, in fact. Just a base of boiled beets, cabbage, onions and broth. And one little personal twist: I chop up and throw in the beet greens too. This not only adds color but a sizable portion of your daily requirement of vitamins A and C not to mention some iron, protein and other nutritional benefits too. Here’s how you can sweat over a steaming pot in July too:

Quick Beet Borscht

Combine and cook in 4 c. of water for 10 min.:

• 2 c. cabbage chopped
• 2 chopped onions

Add and then bring to boil:

• 4 c. veggie stock or any stock you like
• 4 medium beets, cooked and chopped (I cook them with their skins on and then peel. You get a little more dirt in the soup that way but none of us gets enough dirt in our diets the way it is. Find out more about that here.)
• 1 c. of the juice you cooked the beets in
• 1 t. of salt
• dash pepper
• 2 T. lemon juice

Add and then cook a few minutes till greens are just-tender:

• Greens and stems from the beets you just cooked, chopped.

Eat hot with a dollop of sour cream on top.