Recipes include blueberry French toast with blueberry sauce, cold borscht with blueberries and a sublimely simple eggless blueberry ice cream.
Two delicious summer soups, the Lithuanian/Polish cold borscht and Hungarian wild cherry soup, both require dollops of sour cream a no-no for the cholesterolly challenged.
With no sour cream added, cold borscht ($3) is a perfect starter, pleasantly sweet and sour, with plenty of onions, dill and black pepper.
It is a pedestrian- and bike-friendly city where clothing boutiques, run by young designers with an affinity for climate-friendly fabrics and grilled calamari, nestle with button shops, cobblers and old-timer restaurants offering goulash and cold borscht.
A few years ago Andrusha abandoned its old nondescript Second Avenue quarters for this bigger, brighter spot in Carnegie Hill, but it has retained its sure-handed, enjoyable Russian cooking like the thin, crisp, greaseless potato pancakes that arrive with chunky applesauce, and the cold borscht, sweet and perfectly refreshing, served with cucumbers, hard-cooked egg and dill.
Blini Hut's specialties, served on carved wooden trays imported from Russia, include crisp yet moist chicken Kiev ($5.96), chopped salmon or chicken Pojarski cutlet sandwiches ($3.28, $3.79), beef or vegetarian stuffed cabbage ($3.97), hot or cold borscht ($1.99), pirogi ($3.97) and, of course, blini (two for $1.57 with sour cream, $1.85 with a choice of toppings).
A recipe for cold summer borscht, à la Ginsberg.
Not with my mother's cold cabbage borscht with the surreally large dollop of sour cream, not with their Republican politics, not with their superannuated Ford Taurus leaking quietly in front of the single-car working-class garage.
"He looked at me like a starving peasant looks at a cold bowl of borscht," she exults before going on to take credit for bringing about the dissolution of the Communist system.
The borscht, served cold and made with beets, carrots, celery, tomato, potato, grilled onions and cabbage, is an electric poppy color — like it was plucked right out of a Beatriz Milhazes painting.
Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry amid a pop-culture spy craze fueled by the cold war and Ian Fleming, Max was the borscht belt Bond, the seemingly inexpert, ambiguously ethnic American operative who, starting in 1965 and armed with broad jokes, slapstick and a capable female sidekick, Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon, a cool number), somehow for five seasons managed to come out on top.
