Egging me on

Sorry for the long break, I guess I ran out of puff after a breakneck posting pace to start the year. The good news is I just got back from three weeks visiting D. in the United Kingdom and feel re-energized for food and cooking, and so I hope to have some regular content coming at you soon. In the meantime, here's a recipe that was sitting in my drafts since March. Even though its a product of the Winter That Wouldn't End, it's bright and light enough to be perfect for spring. Great for dinner or as a starter.

Avgolemono (Greek lemon soup)

Makes about 4 to 6 servings

4 cups chicken stock

¾ cups white rice

2 large eggs

Juice of 1 lemon

1 or 2 cups cooked chicken, shredded (optional)

Salt and pepper

Chopped parsley

In a medium pot, heat stock to boiling. Stir in rice and reduce to a simmer for 15-20 minutes until rice is cooked. Remove from heat and keep warm.

Meanwhile, separate eggs, reserving whites for another use. Whisk yolks together, then start adding hot stock from the pot, ¼ Cup at a time, whisking continuously, until you have added about 1 cup hot stock (mixture should be hot. This step ensures the eggs don’t curdle).

Add hot egg mixture to pot with rice and stir. Add chicken, if using, stir in the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Adjust seasonings (feel free to add more lemon juice to taste), ladle soup into bowls, and sprinkle with parsley and serve.

Comfort me with noodles

If you have been reading along this year, you probably noticed I’ve been making a lot of references to the weather. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider this 2014 winter has been the crappiest I’ve experienced since I lived in Edmonton. And when you consider crappy winters are par for the course there, that has to put this atypically cold and miserable T.O. winter in the running for worst winter ever. It's a miserable state with the small comfort of knowing millions of people here and elsewhere are going through the same thing.

So: how about a nice, belly-warming, tongue-tingling bowl of noodles?

Sunshine banishes the dark

Yeah, it's still February, but it's not too early to start thinking about summer. Hell, at this point, I can think of little else. Summer means patio season and patio season means patio drinks. Last year was all about the Aperol spritz, the year before the Campari Americano. The early contender for the drink of summer 2014? The Campari Shandy

Doldrums

I suppose it was inevitable that I would fall off the blistering bogging pace I set in January. Chalk it up to the winter doldrums, plus the bout of food poisoning that hit me after a weekend trip to Montreal (picked up, I’m embarrassed to say, from a rare and ill-advised rendezvous with the golden arches) or maybe the fact that I’ve been living on mostly quick, boring recipes that I haven’t deemed worth sharing. So yes, I have fallen off the pace a bit here.

Cold comfort soup II

The Polar Vortex returned this week, so I hunkered down over a few pots of soup. It took me a while to come around on soup as a meal unto itself; the idea of drinking your dinner lacked the appeal of something more toothsome. But I've come around, especially on those days where the wind rattles the windows and dashes snow across the lake.