It will damage you

It is wetly snowing. derspatchel tells me it started around ten-thirty this morning and freaked the cats out. By now they are blasé and much more interested in the white pumpkin in its rustling paper bag or in general mischief. Last night Autolycus figured out how to take the top of a milk bottle.

Yesterday:

My flash "Anonymity" was positively reviewed at Apex Magazine. I'm still happy about this.

M.F. Dulock was selling loukaniko, so I bought some. I plan to make it for dinner tonight.

Rob and I double-featured the evening with el Día de los Muertos at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography (corn-husk tamales, brightly colored paper cut-out skulls fluttering whenever someone opened the door; at the altar open to visitors, I left a memorial card for Luis Yglesias, Rob for Cousin Billy) and the closing night of the Post-Meridian Radio Players' Tomes of Terror: Nevermore. plumtreeblossom's Prohibition-era "The Cask of Amontillado" was the perfect chill to end the night on.

This month J.P. Licks has more than four non-dairy flavors. I got a malt vanilla coconut-milk milkshake. It was delicious.

Hestia is upstairs in the bedroom where it's warmest; I can't blame her. Autolycus is sleeping directly under the thermostat, which means on top of a shelf of my classics books—Cyprus, Carthage, classical Greek religion, the folder of notes for the translation of Ištar's Descent to the Underworld I never published. [edit: He just jumped off the bookshelves and planted himself on my lap. I am warmer than J.G. Pedley's New Light on Ancient Carthage (1980).] Rob is working on a project. I used Daylight Savings' extra hour to write a poem. I really hope this is a pattern. My birthday month was much harder than I wanted it to be.

Hornet vi løfter, nu er det fest

Tonight's first-run attempt at avgolemono soup: a triumphant success.

No Toaster Ovens Involved in This Recipe Unless You Count the Optional Pita Avgolemono Soup

Preparation:

Look out the window at the intermittent flurries of snow and the sudden winter sunset flaming between the roofs in bands of crystalline blue and hot gold and forge-rose between the grey masses of cloud. Halloween really took the day of the dead, when the year too dies seriously this year. Decide soup would be a really good idea. Remember you bought two loukaniko the previous afternoon.

Avgolemono:

8 cups chicken stock
4 eggs
3 lemons
1 cup rice orzo
salt and black pepper to taste

In a soup pot larger than at first you think you'll need, bring chicken stock to a boil over high heat. Stir in one cup of orzo, because although the recipe which inspired tonight's meal calls for rice, and rice is what you remember eating every time you've ordered avgolemono in a restaurant, you and your husband are very hungry and cooking with pasta reduces the soup-making time by a third. While the orzo is cooking—it will take about ten minutes—whisk together the eggs and lemon juice in a glass bowl slightly smaller than ideal, as you will find out when you try to froth the mixture. Change the whisk for a fork and keep frothing. When the orzo is tender and cooked through, carefully ladle one cup of stock into the egg-and-lemon mixture and whisk until fully combined and frothy. Pour back into pot, keep whisking, and simmer an additional couple of minutes while you find the salt and the black pepper. Season to taste.

Using potholders, transfer soup pot to trivet on dining room table and return to kitchen to bring out the loukaniko that have been broiling on both sides in the oven since right after the orzo went into the stock. Put your husband in charge of retrieving the two pita that have been warming in the toaster oven since the addition of the whisked eggs and lemon juice. You were a little skeptical about storebought tzatziki and hummus—you'd intended to make the former from scratch and then suddenly the alternative appearing in a cooler of condiments just seemed like a better idea—but they are delicious and the Kalamata olive hummus is especially impressive. Eat a lot of incredibly tasty food. Make mental note to find out what goes into loukaniko beyond pork and lamb, because it is intensely spiced and deeply savory. Store remaining half of avgolemono in refrigerator. Be just as glad you hadn't settled on any plans for dessert.

Next time we will make the avgolemono with chicken stock we've made ourselves: we didn't have eight cups in the freezer, so I bought some organic chicken stock while picking up the lemons and orzo and it was perfectly serviceable, but this is very clearly a recipe whose quality partly depends on the starting stock and I know our own chicken broth is more flavorful. (Roast chicken carcass plus soup vegetables—carrots, shallots, celery. Come on.) We will also take the time for the cup of rice, because we suspect it will thicken the soup differently. If we make it with orzo again, we might use another egg. Nonetheless, tonight's results were sturdy, silky, sharply lemony without being too bright or too harsh, and seriously full of protein. Would eat again. Good thing, too, because we have lots of it left over.

P.S. I finished this post and checked my e-mail. My poem "Aetiologies" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. This is the poem I wrote last October after the death of Dr. Fiveash, my well-loved Latin teacher. I performed it at his memorial in January; I am very, very glad it will have a home now. When it's published, I will have to let his family know.