Veggie Overload

My friend Amy wrote a blog about becoming "slap happy." In honor of that story, I give you this:

A couple weeks back, I decided to branch out of my cooking routine and try my hand at cabbage borscht. This was partly brought on due to my recent lack of vegetables in my diet (fear of listeria - more pregnancy junk) and fueled by the fact that Eric said he had never eaten borscht.

How could that be? In my German and Irish family, we practically grew up on the stuff. Cabbage is about the one food the two countries agree on completely. Cook it...cook it well...cook it until its done done done.

The only cabbage that the store had in stock just happened to be a purple variety. When I was cutting and chopping the purple onions, purple beets and purple cabbage it all seemed very surreal. I was busy chopping away when Eric came home from work so I greeted him with a cheery, "Go Minnesota Vikings". We had a good chuckle.

After about a half hour, everything was in the pot and boiling away. If you think beets are purple when they are in their natural state, they become an even darker shade in the water. Suddenly the water coming out of the boiling pot was coloring everything around it. My hands were stained, the rags that I used to clean the kitchen was stained and the marble counter tops were an odd hue.

Eric had run off to the store to pick up a few more West Wing episodes for us to watch when he called to say that Blockbuster was missing the ones we wanted. He wanted to know if I wanted to watch "The Color Purple" instead. That began a series of us firing back at each other with movie titles like "Purple Rain," anything with "Barney" or "The Purple Rose of Cairo".

Finally he returned home with some Russian mob movie featuring Vigo Mortenson and Naomi Watts.

At that time, we discovered that the borscht had magically grown in the pot and was enough to feed about 30 hungry Germans. We would be eating this stuff for weeks.

We sat dangerously on our very white couch eating giant bowls of very dark purple borscht while watching the mob movie. As fate would have it, there was a scene in the movie where the Ukrainian Grandma makes a giant pot of Borscht to feed the entire mob.

At this point we lost it.

I don't think either of us really liked my attempt at Borscht, and now it was a thing of mockery. Whether it just wasn't very filling or because we had a years supply of it on the stove, we both managed to down two bowls of the stuff. My ancestors would be proud.

They should really post a label on the stuff though - this is not a good pregnancy food.
Within minutes, my abdomen swelled to about double its size. The laughter didn't help the pain at all. I had to put on emergency sweatpants and let my bowling ball size belly have some space.
Eric and I have been chronicling my pregnancy through weekly photos of my belly. We toyed with the idea of doing a series of "pre-borscht" and "post-borscht" photos to add to that series.

Let that be a warning to all pregnant women out there. Skip the borscht!
Oh, and to everyone else...use GREEN cabbage.