Recipe: Easy Eggdrop Soup

My poor husband, who shall remain nameless, is miserably sick right now with a nasty sinus infection.  So soup happened.

Eggdrop soup has always been one of my favorites.  As a kid, it was as ubiquitous and necessary a dish at a Chinese buffet as the fortune cookie, or those ridiculous little fried doughnut-ball things that were covered in sugar (you know the ones).  Turns out eggdrop soup is like...the second easiest soup in the entire world to make.  Second only to warmed up clear broth.

So here's what ya do!

Easy Eggdrop Soup (as opposed to the difficult kind, which does not exist)

Prep time:  stupid quick
Cook time:  stupid quick
Serves:  this is enough to make 2 huge bowls, or 4 small bowls, of soup

Ingredients

• 6 cups chicken stock
• 6 eggs
• 2 Tbsp white pepper
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 dash five spice powder (not too much)
• 1 slice fresh ginger

Method

• Dump the stock into a pot, and add all other ingredients except the eggs.
• Bring the stock to a boil.  While it's heating, beat eggs lightly in a separate bowl.
• Once the stock is boiling, reduce to a simmer.
• Slowly pour in the eggs, stirring constantly.  The eggs will feather out and cook all whispy-like.

Tips and Variations

• Paleoize it:  Soy sauce contains gluten and (obviously) soy.  Substitute coconut aminos for the soy sauce for a squeaky-clean paleo version.  Or for a gluten-free (but still soy-full) version, use tamari.
• If I really loved my nameless husband, I'd have snipped some fresh scallions over our bowls of soup.  But, well...you know how it is.
• You can really use any stock you have on hand.  Chicken stock will give you the classic clear broth, but full disclosure:  I used homemade goose stock here.
• Serve with hot tea - oolong tea is the traditional choice for the classic Chinese-buffet experience.  For the sickie, I made Pink Pepper Chai from Savoy Tea Co.  And for myself - Lapsang Souchong from The Tao of Tea.  This last tea hails from Wuyi, China, so it was definitely the most authentically Chinese thing on our table tonight.

Tea and Toast...or Why I Don't So Much Do Cozies

Sometimes, thank God, luxury is cheap. Particularly now that it's cold, I like to make myself tea and toast in the afternoon when I get back home from class. Lunch is wearing off about that point, and I'm cold and could use a subtle caffeine hit. In addition to fairly low levels of caffeine, tea contains l-theanine, a sedative compound naturally found in the body. This makes tea, in my experience, the perfect after-school drink. It relaxes you while it revives you. It won't make you feel wired and jittery, and it won't lead to a caffeine crash later on. And then what's not to like about sourdough toast with honey and blueberry jam? Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Quick and easy and cheap and yum.

I really like my teapot. It's a nice cobalt blue that I think sets off my dishes nicely, and it holds enough for you to have tea even when you're not alone! I really like using it, and this is why I'm never going to knit a tea cozy. It's not that I object to cozies themselves (although I have heard from admitted tea snobs that they "stew the tea." I'm not 100% sure what that means). But why would I want to hide such a nice thing as my teapot behind some flouncy, squooshy dish-sweater?

I avoid tea cozies for the same reason I avoid tablecloths. My roommates have a really nice dining-room table made out of rich, dark wood. Why would you want to cover that up? I love the look of wood (although what you see pictured is "birch veneer," courtesy of Ikea. It's fake, but I still like the look of it). I suppose if you happen to prefer the look of lace to the look of wood, it would make sense to strew your surfaces with doilies and cloths. I prefer the surfaces themselves. I love the texture you can see in a smooth piece of wood. I love the way the light plays off of the shiny surface of my teapot. I guess I could go for a table-runner, as long as it didn't detract from the look of the wood.

There seems to be a cozy-craze afoot in the world of knitting at present. If you look hard enough, you can find a pattern for a knitted object that will fit nicely around anything. That just seems a bit excessive to me. Maybe it's just that my aesthetic happens not to involve covering things, but can't we think of something useful to knit? Is a layer of yarn really going to protect your iPod if you drop it on the sidewalk? Is your decoratively floral box of kleenexes really so hideous that it needs its own ruffly sweater? I thought I'd seen the cozy-craze at its worst when I found this ice-cream pint cozy, but then an image flashed into my head: I'm blundering toward the freezer in the dead of night. I need ice-cream. All I want is to stand next to the freezer blearily devouring ice-cream from the carton, but my hands...dear Gods, I can't feel my hands!!! That sweet, treacherous ice-cream has frozen them completely numb. So I'm willing to admit that the ice-cream pint cozy is absolute genius.

This cozy-craze is delightfully expressed by the character Emerson Cod in the shamefully canceled series "Pushing Daisies." Emerson is a tough, cynical PI with a heart of stone. He is also a stress-knitter. His office is filled with objects wearing little object-sweaters - there is a file-holder cozy, a pencil-holder cozy, he even tucks wads of cash away in a drawer, lovingly arranged in little green money cozies. It's the juxtaposition inherent in this image that tickles me. It's why I get a kick out of knitting a sweater on the bus with my rapier leaning against my seat. And it's why I am so pleased that this motorcycle cozy exists!