Got butter and eggs?

food and cooking, Lent, , ,
Custard

In the Orthodox Church we start fasting from meat a week before full-on Lent. And this week we don’t restrict ourselves otherwise, even on Wednesday and Friday. I thought I might post an appropriate recipe … but I’ve run out of time, so instead I’m just going to put up a few pictures of such foods as I have cooked, and might cook again, during these seven days.

Butter Week Quiche
Salty Honey Pie

As I eat more butter than cheese always, I prefer to call it Butter Week,
but Cheesefare Week is also a good name.

Egg Lemon Soup

I can make Egg Lemon Soup with vegetable broth instead of the traditional chicken broth, but I can’t see making it without eggs, though I’ve seen recipes for such a thing. But please, give it a new name if you are going to do that!

Tea Eggs

You know I’ve never even flirted with the idea of being vegan.

Lemon Sour Cream Cake

You can find some of these recipes on my Recipes page tabbed above.
Happy Butter Week!

Rosemary and bees.

bees, ,

By the time I got out for a walk today, the sun was shining. My neighbor’s rosemary bushes are in bloom — unlike mine which gets no morning sun in winter — and lots of bees were drinking their breakfast there. I seemed to soak up some of their energy just watching them for a minute.

As of this evening my neighbor who said he would cut up my Christmas tree seems to have forgotten. But this morning, as I continued past the rosemary, I greeted a third neighbor loading up her own green bin with prunings from a shade tree. She offered to come down with her chain saw to cut my tree, but I declined; then she suggested that I put the whole tree at the curb, where she thinks the garbage man will kindly pick it up. So I did that. Tomorrow will show the results of the experiment!

The Traveling Onion

food and cooking, poetry,

THE TRAVELING ONION

“It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Egypt it was an
object of worship — why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe.” — Better Living Cookbook

When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles,
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way the knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.
And I would never scold the onion
for causing tears.
It is right that tears fall
for something small and forgotten.
How at meal, we sit to eat,
commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma
but never on the translucence of onion,
now limp, now divided,
or its traditionally honorable career:
For the sake of others,
disappear.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Onions