Borscht Baby!

A quick little entry on the joys of this summer treat!  If I had been introduced to this velvety smooth goodness as a youngster, My lifelong aversion to the dread beet may have been avoided!
The farm share has been giving us beets, and although I can tolerate and even enjoy them to some degree simmered forever in butter, they just never really excite me.  so when I had two week's worth staring me down, I decided to go with a nice cooling soup.
I searched through the internet sites I usually troll for recipes and settled on a Lithuanian style Borscht, pureed.
Here is what I used:
Around two pounds of beets, cleaned peeled and sliced.
1 large cucumber, peeled, split, seeded, and chopped.
4 Tbsp butter
4 Cups Non Fat milk
4 Tbsp Lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/8 Cup minced fresh basil
3-4 Tbsp White Vinegar
Salt
Pepper
First I put the beets in a heavy saucepan and simmered them in butter with a little salt and pepper for like an hour.
Then I cooled the beets by immersing a bowl in a sink filled with ice water
While the beets were cooling I added the lemon juice to the skim milk to make a buttermilk substitute.  You could use yogurt, sour cream, or buttermilk... or even Kefir.  I actually can taste a bit of lemon in my finished soup and I like it, so, it's up to you how you go.
Then I put the beets in the processor, and added the cucumber, onion and basil (The original recipe called for dill, which I am not a big fan of, it also had no instructions for pureeing the soup.) and process till ...well... processed.
I transferred 1/2 the mix to a blender, added half the sour milk and started pureeing the soup and forcing through a mesh strainer till it reached the desired silky smooth texture.
I then refrigerated the soup overnight.  This is an important step.
The end result is a deliciously smooth, cooling treat, like a beet gaspacho. It is shown with a dollop of sour cream swirled in.  The lemon and basil accent the beets better than I expected.