Elizabeth Keyser

At the first hint of a scratchy throat, I make a potent garlic soup, boosted by healthy herbs and spices.  The basis of this soup is my beloved Garlic Soup from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  It’s made with garlic, sage, thyme, fresh parsley, thyme, and water.  I veer off the original recipe to include inflammation- reducing, circulation-enhancing, immune-strengthening herbs and spices.

Start with a head of garlic, add mushroom, onion, thyme, black peppercorn,  clove, hot pepper, cardamom pods, cumin seeds, bay leaves, galangal, ginger, turmeric, and Sichuan peppercorns.  If there are other healthy spices you love, add them too. The only reason I didn’t include sage and parsley is because I was out.

Add real olive oil.

Garlic soup can be veggie, made with water. Or you can use chicken stock.  I needed extra fortification, so I used chicken stock .  Add salt accordingly.

Bring to a boil, then simmer, partially covered for 40 minutes. Strain, and mash the garlic cloves through the strainer.

If you’ve used water, before serving you could enrich the soup with an egg. Use a farm fresh egg to make a quick mayonnaise, or add a poached egg to the soup.

Final garnishes can included a crouton, with or without grated gruyere, a chiffonade of greens, or sprinkling of herbs.

Did it cure me? I believe so. Give it a try.

I’ve lost count of how many years ago I chanced upon Los Poblanos in Norwalk, but since then, I’ve probably eaten there more than any other place in Fairfield County. It specializes in the traditional food of Puebla, Mexico.

Most recently, Juan put cochinita on the menu. Pork slow cooked to complete tenderness in an ineffable blend of spices. It’s served with pickled red onions, salsa, guacamole, and warm tortillas.

How can you order enchiladas when that’s on the menu? Well, sometimes you’re craving enchiladas in green sauce.

or red sauce,

or a quick plate of carnitas tacos.

But what I order most frequently, because Los Poblanos is the only place that makes them so well, are chiles rellenos.  My love of chiles rellenos is documented here.

In the fall, Juan makes the famous chiles en nogata,  poblanos stuffed with fruit, nuts and pork, and draped in walnut sauce, topped with pomegranate seeds. It’s a special dish, and a lot of work. “That’s why we make it only once a year,” Juan told me.

It’s well worth the wait.  In the meantime…

I go through breakfast phases. I’ll eat the same breakfast for a week or two, then move on to a variation. Bread, toasted or warmed, is essential. So is protein. Recently, I was on a one-egg, one-mushroom omelet kick. Usually with fresh herbs, chives, or parsley. Something quickly snipped from the yard, run under water, and minced.  Sometimes I’d add cheese, then fold the omelet in quarters and put it on buttered bread or roll.

The omelets start with good eggs. If I’m lucky, a friend gives me eggs from her chickens.

The only thing that changed during the one-egg, one-mushroom kick was the kind of bread. Here it is on a toasted Honey-12 Grain roll from Fairfield Bread Company.

Another morning I had it on a toasted Portuguese Roll from Fairfield Bread Company. These are the fluffiest Portuguese Rolls.

One morning I folded the omelet in half, and had a toasted piece of FBC’s organic Bridgeport Sour on the side. By the puffy look of that omelet, I’d say there’s melted brie inside.

The bread I use most often is The Luncheonette. If we’re out of  eggs from Sport Hill Farm, I might make a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, especially if we have homemade jam in the fridge.

Homemade peach jam with peanut butter on toasted Luncheonette from Fairfield Bread Company.

If there’s cheese and an interesting ham product in the house, I’ll have a breakfast like this. Taste of Europe in Norwalk is one of my favorite places for Polish and German ham and sausages.

Funny how I don’t have pictures of my brie and toast breakfasts. The cheese is too tempting to delay eating it.

The tradition of cookie baking is strong in the German side of my husband’s family.  The book Backen fur Weihnachten, beautifully photographed with step by step instructions, bridges the language gap.

Each year we make cookies we’ve never made before. This year the pistachio cookies with dark chocolate launched the season.  I made one mistake, interpreting zitronensaft as lemon zest instead of juice. Actually, I used lime zest, which seemed strong the first day, but mellowed in the following days.

Next up, Schoko-Mandel-Makronen.

These turned into mocha almond macarons, made of fluffy egg whites, powdered sugar, grated chocolate and ground toasted almonds. The recipe also called for 2 tablespoons of cocoa, and we were out, so I substituted 1 tablespoon of ground coffee beans. And since I like the German expression of “knife’s point” of cinnamon, I added a “knife’s point” of cayenne pepper. Surely there is a very long German phrase that will describe the subtle background notes these spices lent to the coffee and chocolate. Or maybe not.

Next, I wanted a butter cookie.

In past years we’ve made Vanillekipferln, those powered sugar crescent-shaped butter cookies. But powered sugar is messy, and we wanted to make something new.

Butter-Ausstecherele is the name of these rolled and cut cookies. The dough was very soft, so I rested it in the fridge, rolled it out (it needed a lot of flour) in batches, and put the cookie sheets in the fridge while when rolling out the next portion.

I made a translation mistake again. Befuddled by abgeriebene schale einer halben zitrone, I added lime juice, but no zest.

For the icing, the recipe suggested using zitronensaft, which we all now know means lemon juice.  Instead, I used bourbon vanilla. I do not regret it.