The 6th graders from school #664 Vostochny of Moscow

The next dish of our dinner is soup. Soup is essential to the Russian dinner. Specialists say that you cannot find such a variety of soups in any other cuisine. You can find cold soups here, vegetable soups, soups with some kind of pasta, schi (the main type of Russian soups - given above) in different variations, various fish soups, and soups based on using cereals. The variety of each type is really great. Besides because of the fact that the Russians are great soup-eaters we adopted a lot of additional varieties of soups from neighboring nations.

Schi

Ingredients:
500 g of meat (beef brisket), 750g of cabbage, 1 carrot, 3 onions, 1 potato, 1 parsley root, 1 tomato or 1 table spoon of tomato puree, 1 bay leaf, 5-6 peas of black pepper, a bunch of both fennel and spring parsley,

Directions:
1. Prepare meat stock of 1,5-2 l water, meat, 1 whole onion, parsley root and 1 potato. Boil meat for 1 hour and a half then strain. Remove onion, parsley root and potato.
2. Meanwhile core the cabbage without cutting it then put it into a slightly salty water for 30 minutes and then pour boiling water over it. Cut into straw.
3. Peel the tomato and chop it or cut it into four pieces. (Instead of fresh tomato you can use tinned tomato puree). Chop the onions and grate the carrot.
4. Put the prepared vegetables into meat stock. Add salt to your liking. Boil on average heat until the cabbage is cooked.
5. Just 5-10 minutes before taking the soup off the heat, add chopped fennel, spring parsley, pepper and bay leaf.
6. Let the soup stand for a while.
7. The soup is eaten with sour cream. It's a custom. Usually 1 or 2 tablespoons of sour cream are added to the soup in the plate. It is wonderful with rye bread!

By the way a real Russian schi is made of a kind of "sauer kraut" (if we do not misspelt the German words)

Frequently prepared by Ivan Kapran's grandma