One spice that Russians really like is хрен horseradish. Many American families never buy horseradish; I don't think my mother ever had it in our household, so it's worth pointing out that the horseradish root looks like this:

The root is then ground into a paste, and it is used as spice or a condiment on the side:

I've never encountered the word in the plural, only the singular:

Horseradish is used with a variety of dishes:

Although хрен is a perfectly good word, completely acceptable in polite company, it has another use, too...

Warning! The following paragraphs contain Russian and English vulgarity.

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This morning I was reading about the Korean drink hwachae and realized “Hey, this is basically the same thing as компот!”

What is компот? It is a beverage made, essentially, by boiling fruit in water with some sugar and then letting the liquid cool down. You can make компот out of all sorts of fruit, fresh or dried. When you put a pitcher of it on the table, you leave the marvelous chunks of fruit in, not straining it out. The Grandma's Advice website lists the following versions:

It's a great summer drink of course, but the Russians will drink it in winter, too. Here are some sample sentences:

Сок is the Russian word for juice.

This week I bought myself a juicer. Not just any juicer, but the one from the infomercials- Jack LaLanne's Power Juicer Deluxe!

Я купилa соковыжималку высшего класса.
I bought a high quality juicer.

It was very exciting! Ok, I admit it, I love gadgets. But this one is going to change my life, I just know it. From now on, I will drink healthy. Just think of the vitamins!

Всё, с сегодняшнего дня я сажусь на соковою диету.*
That's it, I am going on an all-juice diet, starting today.

Now it was time to try out my wonderful, new, health-making juicer. So I made a vegetable juice and a fruit juice. Unfortunately, the veggie was a failed experiment. It just wasn't yummy. The fruit juice on the other hand, was a complete success!

Я сделала очень вкусный сок из яблок, апельсинов, и сливы.
I made a delicious juice out of apples, oranges, and plums.

Having completed my juicer tests, it was time to clean up. This meant taking the machine apart and doing my least favorite chore: washing dishes.

Hmmm, I think it's time to take a short break from the Juicer Deluxe. Maybe I'll change my life and get healthy next year.

За неделю все соки мне надоели.
Within a week, I was sick of all juices.

*As you may have noticed, when speaking of "going on a diet," Russians will say that they are "sitting on a diet." Almost as though they will sit down and not budge from said diet.

The word for juice is сок. Usually when we talk about juice, we specify the type of juice, thus we have phrases like:

In English the phrase “apple juice” is made up of two nouns where the first noun modifies the second noun. In Russian you don't normally use a first noun to modify a second noun. Instead you change the first noun into an adjective and then use it with the second word, thus:

Here are some sample sentences:

Many liquids sometimes appear in the genitive case to indicate ‘a quantity of,’ and juice is one of them. We call that usage the partitive genitive. Note the contrast in these sentences:

Сок is interesting because it has an alternative partitive genitive case form соку in addition to the regular genitive; sometimes we call those forms ‘second genitives.’ Thus you might come across:

Those second genitives are becoming less and less common. They are more conversational in style, less formal. You are very likely to hear them out of the mouth of someone's grandmother. A younger person with a big-city education will use them less often.

If you look up the word котлета in some Russian-English dictionaries, you will find the word cutlet as a translation. If you do, take your black pen and cross that line of the dictionary out. In modern American English a cutlet is a piece of meat, but it is NEVER ground meat.¹ In Russian котлета means a patty of ground meat.

You can have all sorts of ground meat patties, of course, from all sorts of animals:

Ground meat patties are very common in Russian cafeterias and on the table in Russian homes. Here are some sample sentences:

¹ If you look at certain dictionaries, e.g. the current definition of cutlet at dictionary.com (mirror) includes something like “a flat croquette.” That is not a current meaning of the word in the US.

² Although “fish patties” is a perfectly grammatical phrase in English, I don't think I've ever had a fish patty in the US in my entire life. The phrase sounds bizarre to the average American ear.