Her name was Natalya. Her cheeks were ruddy, like a matryoshka doll. She had the figure of a dome atop St. Basil’s Cathedral. She was filthy, like she’d been dragged across a field.

Natalya, she was a fine onion. Then I made her into borscht soup, along with her friends; Ivan the potato, Yevgenia the beet, Mikhail the carrot, and Vladimir the beef chuck.

I bought the whole gang at LavkaLavka, an organic market in downtown Moscow (“lavka” means “little store”).

Russians tend to take things to the extreme, and this farm-to-table grocery store is no exception. Dirt is left on the produce. (Why? “Because it comes from Earth,” the clerk said.) The farmers names are printed on the labels. Each farmer