Category Archives: food and cooking

Egg Lemon Soup

food and cooking,


I’ve been cooking some old favorites today. One of them is Egg Lemon Soup. I got my recipe from a Greek cookbook decades ago, so I stick by it, though I’ve seen other methods and ingredients for making this soup. I’m sure every Greek lady has her own version, as well.

GREEK EGG LEMON SOUP

1 1/2 quarts chicken stock

juice of 1-2 lemons (I always use 2)

1/4 teaspoon summer savory (If you don’t have this, use oregano. I think the savory is a relative of oregano). I used dried, but fresh would be lovely and leave you something to garnish with.

4 eggs, beaten

1 cup cooked rice (If you don’t have this, cook 1/2 cup raw rice in the stock until tender, and then the rice will just be in there from the beginning.)

Heat the stock to almost boiling, with the herb. Beat the eggs and quickly whisk in the lemon juice. You can add some of the zest if you want. While beating briskly, add a cup or two of the broth to the egg mixture. Then add it back into the pot, along with the rice. Keep it from boiling, or it may curdle. Serve.

A bit of fresh chopped parsley would be perfect for scattering on top of this soup, but I couldn’t find one leaf of it in the garden.

So…it’s too cool a climate here to be able to eat outdoors very often, but the flip side of that is, we get to eat soup all summer long!

A saint, a party, a hot day.

church, food and cooking, garden, , ,

The most important thing, today, is that it is the day when we commemorate Saint Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward and follower of Christ, one of the women who came to the tomb to anoint His body, only to find that He was not there, because our Lord had risen from the dead.

I took the name of Joanna as my Orthodox, baptismal name when I converted, so “her day” is my day, and thoughts of her and her example, our communion in Christ, our prayers for each other, overshadowed the day with a sweetness. This evening, I was able to go to Vespers, always a blessed beginning of The Lord’s Day.

But I also went to a tea party given by a young friend. It was hot today, and we ate out of doors under an awning. The colors were refreshing, including the tea: green or passion fruit. It was iced tea, served in teacups.

My friends’ garden is always full of flowers, of few of which were happy to float in plenty of water, and in the shade, on such a day.

Salad was the perfect main course, followed by ice cream. I had no time to photograph the ice cream as I was too busy eating it before it melted.

When I came home, Mr. Glad let me know that as the forecast is for more heat tomorrow, he invited some other young friends to come and swim after church tomorrow. I immediately thought of how hungry kids get after swimming, and remembered that I had some cookie dough in the freezer. I can’t remember if I made the dough for Christmas or for a tea party, but no matter, it baked up into nice Cardamom Butter Squares tonight. Even on hot days, in our area, the nights are usually cool. If one has baking to do, it is best to do it in the evening so that all that oven heat dissipates before the next day. This is one way we manage without air conditioning.

In the background of the cookies, you can see some crayons and paper, tools for a very preliminary step toward designing a baby quilt I hope to make this summer. One step at a time…”inch by inch, it’s a cinch.”

It was a full and rich day, on many levels. As I drove home from Vespers, I even saw “my” goslings in the park!

Back to Being Behind

food and cooking, housework

I’m so glad to feel better today. Cleaned the car, cleaned my gardening tote, cleaned out the refrigerator, went grocery shopping with dear husband, and got ready for tomorrow, when I am going to teach a young friend to make sticky rice, the Laotian kind.

But today, I continued trying to use things up. Some professional food bloggers are doing that this week, too, so they aren’t even shopping today. They call it Eating Down the Fridge Week, which I find a much more appealing title than a similar idea I’ve heard, C.O.R.N., for Clean Out Refrigerator Night. I tried telling B., once or twice, that it was CORN night, but that was way confusing and evidently annoying.

One of these food writers confessed that she had four refrigerators out of which to Eat Down! (I trust she has a lot of people to feed.) That’s in addition to the freezer and the pantry which are to be one’s resources, as well. I’m all for it, but today…well, the emphasis was not on cooking, as I’ve told you. But I definitely used up some things: old frozen pineapple, and frozen ripe banana, and some rice protein, ice and almond milk… that vanilla paste that I never use: I put all those in the blender and made it my lunch. The thermometer got up to 80° today, maybe higher, and after working out in that sun, a healthy smoothie was quite welcome. So what if it wasn’t the best; it was very satisfying to Eat Down the Fridge.

Low-Lying Days

books, food and cooking, garden, poetry,

The last few days have found one or both of us down with the flu. I resisted until yesterday, after I returned from an early-morning gardening session at church, where I had accidentally broken off a rosebud. This morning it greeted me thus. I’m very thankful for it, a little present to cheer me up as I am missing a wedding and the chance to visit with friends and family from out of town.

Last evening was my worst sickly period, and the thought of cooking dinner made me cry. So I sat on the patio and read The Folding Cliffs. What strange interaction followed, and gave me creative energy to go into the kitchen and make dinner, I can’t really understand, and I won’t try to go into it here–but I managed to make another meal with what was on hand, and this time it was burritos with scrambled egg filling, spiced with chili and cumin, onions and garlic and sweet red pepper and cilantro. Cheese, too. And love and thankfulness and peace. That was the miracle that came from On High, via a fellow human using the written word with care.

And some fresh roundish fruits we called tomatoes, one each left in produce bags from two shopping expeditions. I had bought one, Mr. Glad the other. One from Mexico–not surprising–and the other from….Canada! What? The information on the sticker was so alarming to me, my mind ran away and I forgot to take a picture for proof that the world had turned upside-down, not least geographically.

I didn’t add chile-type “heat” to the filling I made, so we added it at the table in the form of sauce from a bottle. And this is the perfect time to display photos I took some time ago and have been waiting for a chance to use.

Whether or not something requiring spicing-up is going to be on the table that night, when my husband and I are in a certain local market, we like to peruse this library of hot sauces, right next to bags of hot chiles, in case you want to make your own, perhaps.

But we rarely have any of these playfully fiery brews around to use on our own Tex-Mex food, as we long ago developed a taste for Crystal Louisiana Hot Sauce, when as head cook I didn’t always distinguish one culinary region from another. And Crystal is cheap.

At the end of our meal, there were a few chunks of the reddish fruit left in their blue bowl. My man asked what to do with them, and I said, “Throw them out. I don’t ever want to buy a tomato out of season again.” You see, I had also been reading about M.F.K. Fisher and realizing that these sorry, pale things with nary a drop of flavor or juice do not express me. Ha ha.

I’d like to return my kitchen to the days memorialized in this photo, when we had our fill of dead ripe tomatoes in the summer and fall, and the rest of the year made do with canned or dried or frozen.

In the coming months I’ll write more about tomatoes– growing, picking, buying, cooking. As to eating them fresh, I think it’s best, for now, merely to anticipate.