Food is important to my family. We’re Greek. It comes with the territory. One recipe in particular that’s been passed down from my progiagiá and is my favorite comfort food in the whole wide world is chicken soup with avgolemono sauce. I make it a little differently than my progiagiá, but that’s what happens when you don’t have time to sit around and boil a chicken all day to make your own stock. Here’s the quick and dirty version of how I make my family’s avgolemono soup.
Ingredients:
5 sticks celery
3 carrots
½ onion
6 chicken thighs (or breasts if you prefer white meat)
2 to 3 boxes chicken broth (depending on how brothy you like your soup)
At least two cups orzo or brown rice
4 eggs
2 juicy lemons
Black peppercorns
Olive oil
First, chop up the celery, carrots, and onion. It doesn’t matter how you choose to cut your vegetables so long as you stay consistent. Once finished, put the vegetables in the bottom of your soup pot, throw in enough olive oil so the vegetables will not burn, and sauté until the onion begins to turn translucent and the carrots are not quite so crisp.
Once the vegetables are sautéd to your liking, add two boxes of chicken broth, as many peppercorns as you like (I use 5 at least) along with a little cracked pepper over the top, and your chicken meat. Bring the soup to a boil and let the meat cook via boiling. This should take anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes. Remove a piece of chicken with tongs and cut it open to check if the meat is cooked at 15 minutes. If it is not, replace the meat and continue to boil. Check again as needed.
While the meat is boiling, separate your eggs. You may place your yolks aside for a decadent scramble the next morning (add a little milk and cheese to them and you’ll have the most delicious scrambled eggs you’ve ever had in your life). Place the whites in a bowl large enough to temper the avgolemono sauce in later, and beat the egg whites until still. You may use a mixer for this step, but I stubbornly beat them by hand. It’s a really fun way to relieve stress. When the whites are stiff, juice your lemons and add the juice to the bowl. Beat again until combined. Set your avgolemono sauce aside and return to the soup.
When your chicken meat has cooked, remove all of the meat from the soup. Place it on a cutting board and prepare to shred it. Add your rice or orzo to the soup at this time so it has time to cook properly. You’ll want to reduce the heat from a boil to at least medium as well. Shred the meat and return it to the soup. Check to make sure the rice or orzo has cooked properly, give your avgolemono sauce a touch-up beat with your whisk, and then begin tempering the sauce.
Tempering goes best when you have someone else helping you. The goal is to heat the avgolemono sauce slowly so that the egg whites do not solidify into egg ribbons or some monstrous version of a scrambled egg. In order to achieve this, have someone slowly pour broth into the sauce while you stir the sauce constantly.
Once the sauce has reached the same temperature as the soup, combine the two and serve. The soup is always a little different each time, but it’s always a refreshingly tart and hardy meal. This is the dish I make when life gives me lemons.
Which leads me to our media tie in: stories that make the best of terrible situations. The two examples I’d like to point to of this are The Road to El Dorado and Treasure Planet.
Miguel and Tulio, the two leads of The Road to El Dorado, have extraordinarily bad luck—or perhaps it’s just a consequence of their lives as con artists. Within the first ten minutes of the movie they are chased by a bull, then an angry mob, and then unwillingly exported from Spain aboard Cortez’s ship when the water barrels they chose to hide in are put on board. Whenever their luck seems to look up, the previous circumstance is replaced by one worse than the one they just solved. They escape from the water barrels only to be thrown in Cortez’s brig.
They escape from the brig only to wind up adrift at sea with no provisions.
They wash up on shore only to go on a wild goose chase for a city of gold.
They find the city of gold only to be mistaken for gods.
They con the locals into believing they actually are gods only to be found out by the terrifying speaker for the gods Tzekel-kan.
They defeat Tzekel-kan only to accidentally put him right in Cortez’s path—who decides to use Tzekel-kan to get to El Dorado.
Miguel and Tulio end up giving up the things they originally said they wanted out of their lives—gold for Tulio and adventure for Miguel—in order to save the city of El Dorado and each other. Although their story is riddled with bad luck and everything always seemed to get worse even when being showered with loads of tribute, Miguel and Tulio get through the tough times by sticking together.
James Pleiades Hawkins of Treasure Planet doesn’t have it so easy, however. Instead of a constant companion to rely on, Jim has an absent father to long for. A steampunk-esque, space-set retelling of Treasure Island, Jim sets out to find his fortune only after his mother’s Benbow Inn is burned to the ground. This particular incarnation of Jim also has a bit of a record with the police for riding his solar surfer in restricted areas and blowing off school. Convinced he doesn’t have a future and that he can’t do anything right, Jim sets out for “a few character building months in space” to see if he can find the treasure marked on the map that burned the last of what he considered a life to ashes. Although Jim isn’t able to recover any of the actual gold he meant to find, Jim does come out of his journey with some treasure.
At the beginning of his voyage, Jim is assigned to be the cabin boy for the ship’s cook: a cyborg named Long John Silver. Silver turns out to be the leader of the gang of pirates that burned the Benbow Inn to the ground in search of Jim’s treasure map, but Silver also functions as a father figure. The correlations between Silver and Jim’s absent father are remarkably striking during the movie’s musical interlude of “I’m Still Here” by John Rzeznik.
Silver also functions as a source of support for Jim when they lose a crew member and Jim blames himself for it.
One might think that Silver’s inevitable betrayal would cheapen or even undo the good of Jim’s experiences with Silver. Instead, Jim uses what Silver taught him against him, quoting Silver’s own words of “stick to it” back at him when Silver tries to force Jim and his remaining friends to surrender. But then Jim finds out the treasure map is still on the ship now controlled by pirates. He recovers it only to return and to find his friends being held hostage and be forced into decoding the map for the pirates. Even once they find the treasure, they mistakenly activate a booby-trap that is set to blow the whole trove to smithereens in a matter of minutes. Jim is forced to improvise in an impossible situation—and it’s only Silver’s continued support of Jim that allows Jim to save the day with his quick thinking. Much like Tulio and Miguel, Silver and Jim both give up their dream of claiming a treasure trove to save each other.
Unlike Tulio and Miguel, however, Silver and Jim do not ride off into the sunset together to embark on more adventures. Silver is an outlaw, and Jim… Well, thanks to an old cyborg who set him straight, he sees a future for himself again. Jim lets Silver get away, and Silver gives Jim the treasure salvaged so Jim’s mother can rebuild her inn. Even though they part, the final shots of the movie picture Jim looking up into the sky to see a cloud shaped like Silver; gleaming cyborg eye and all.
No matter the situation, it’s always good to remember the people who have your back, believe in you, and will teach you the perfect recipe for when two juicy lemons get thrown in your face.
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