Simple Comfort Food #324

Both of us are incredible phlegm factories this week, though the Boy has it worse with a deep chest cold that has him hacking like a consumptive Keats. Ironically, the weather is gorgeous and mild--and perfect for walking.

In the mean time, we've been subsisting on soups, tea and decongestants.

Here's a simple, cheap, and quick recipe for a delicious Greek soup: Avgolemono (or if, like me, and you pronounce it differently each time--lemon rice soup). Sadly, I never remember to write down amounts, so I'll estimate. This simple, meatless version of Avgolemono is really very flexible though, and hard to ruin.

Lemon Rice Soup

Ingredients:

3 eggs
several chicken bouillon cubes
cooked rice - leftover rice from Chinese takeout? Perfect!
lemon juice

The reason I use bouillon with this soup rather than a lovely homemade stock, or an organic thing out of a box is simple: Remember--the idea is that you're a snot zombie flailing around the kitchen for something warm and comfort foody. The easier the better. Also, for this soup, it has enough salt and flavor that it's not necessary to mess with spicing or salting the soup at all.

Put water in a pot and turn on medium high. Drop in bouillon cubes and dissolve them. Drop in the rice (I added about a cup, so there was some good substance to the soup). In a separate bowl, crack the eggs and whisk them together. When the soup is hot, but not quite boiling, pour in in the eggs and stir immediately. They'll cook right away, making the soup thicken. Add lemon juice to taste. Try a tablespoon, and work up from there. We like ours with a definite lemon tang to it.

You just made tasty soup in under 5 minutes! Take the bowl back to bed and read while eating it.

A Sweet Valentine's Day

The Boy and I went maple sugaring at the Cincinnati Nature Center for Valentine's Day! The center has their own classic sugar house with the boiling facilities and all amid a bunch of maple trees that they're just beginning to tap for the season. The class took us through all the steps of picking a tree, tapping, collecting, and boiling the syrup down. It was really fascinating. Here are some steps for tapping:

1. Pick a tree that is at least 10 inches in diameter at chest height.
2. When deciding where to tap, take into account large roots and branches, and try to tap above or below those a couple feet off the ground. That's where the sap supply is sure to be strong. If it's possible to tap on the south side, that's a good option, since it warms up, and the sap will flow more steadily.
3. Sterilize your drill bit in alcohol between each tree, since bacteria can be transmitted from tree to tree.
4. Drill--angling very slightly up and about an inch and a half in.
5. The taps are also called "splines." Spline is apparently a corruption of the word "spill," which is literally what the sap did when we drilled the hole.
6. When you pound the tap into the tree, listen for it to hit the back of the drilled hole--the sound of the hits becomes more resonant.
7. Hang and cover the bucket. Voila!

The sap flowed out completely clear and the consistency of water. It had a very very mild maple flavor, and just a hint of sweetness. We were told that making tea out of maple sap is absolutely fantastic, and I believe it! The folks working in the sugar house confided that in the mornings they sometimes scoop out a ladle or two of the hot sap before it gets boiling and pop a tea bag into it. The sugar house smelled absolutely like heaven--the wood fire, along with the mild smell of maple syrup cooking was wonderful.

Sap needs to be treated like milk when it comes to how perishable it is. It should be refrigerated if you're not going to boil it the same day, and once it becomes any color other than clear (brownish, or milky) it means bacteria's beginning to form, and the sap is turning.

You need about 5 gallons of sap for a pint of maple syrup--that's a whole lot of evaporating. The syrup boils in a massive vat with a series of trenches the sap moves through as it cooks. They stand by to skim off the impurities that rise to the top, and it slowly becomes one of my favorite flavors. They recommended that if you're going to make syrup on your stove top, you use 4 big pots, and slowly transfer the syrup around from pot to pot. If it stays on one place too long it darkens too quickly. How long it takes depends on the humidity, your stove, etc.

One thing I found interesting is that the thing that decides the grade of syrup is the color. "Grade B" maple syrup is simply darker and more caramelized. It also is supposed to have more maple flavor to it. That sounds great to me, yet it's the cheaper type--go figure!

Apparently there's a class on cooking with maple syrup coming up at the Nature Center, and I think we may need to get in on that too.

Why I like browsing Vimeo:

I stumble over little gems like this. Not to mention the fantastic absence of Youtube commenters.


Light-Paint Piano Player from Ryan Cashman on Vimeo.

Man on Wire

We recently watched the documentary Man on Wire, which is the story of wirewalker Phillipe Petit's quest to secretly string a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, and walk it. Petit suceeded--on August 7, 1974 he and some friends managed to sneak into the unfinished towers, went through the ordeal of placing the cables, and he stepped onto the wire, and into history. The documentary is really beautifully filmed. There is a lot of footage of a young Petit and his cohorts, and that, combined with some treated new film make a fantastic visual feel. It's just plain pretty to look at.

However, The Boy and I being the nerds we are, were equally interested in what the documentary said by omission.

One thing I'm sure was intentional was that the film, though it was an homage to the Twin Towers, said not a word about September 11. I'm sure it was because they didn't want to dilute their story, and this makes sense. I appreciated it. It allowed us to look at the massive scope of the towers and feel the loss of the lives, the buildings, and that day the world changed in a very subtle way. In a way, the film is about a love story between this man and the towers. They make him breathless. He speaks about them in poetry. It makes the viewer love and miss them as well, if only as a symbol of a time when the world seemed safer and happier.

Something the film covered only briefly was the effect of Petit on the people around him. He's a sort of rock star--charismatic and convincing, talking people into helping him possibly lose his life. What nobody says is that he's also probably also an egomaniac who, in this stunt, simply used the people around him as a means to an end, letting relationships die in the process.

In the interviews, Petit seems enamored of himself. He doesn't doesn't speak much about the friends who were crucial to his stunt, and who worked for years so that he could step out onto a wire and take the glory. He's thrilled to tell you he's a visionary, and that the world will remember him. The man who was his best friend struggles to hold back tears, and fails, saying that after the stunt, everything changed. Their friendship changed. The woman who was his girlfriend at the time politely looks away, and says that once Phillipe found fame, she realized it was time that their relationship moved along so he would be free. It's pretty clear that this means, "He immediately began screwing groupies (which he actually did, while at the same moment, his friends--the people who made the stunt possible--were under arrest and being deported from the country) and he decided he was too famous to be with me."

It's a fascinating and sort of sad story. An interesting film--well worth watching.

Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

This is a clever music video, and fun to look at. Stop motion animation isn't something that gets done with actual people often enough.