UPDATE: I won! I was one of the winners of the audiobook The Fall of Kings for this recipe entry!
My entry for Ellen Kushner's Riverside Cookbook. I am calling this Katie's Country Chicken Noodle Soup and I would like to think that Katherine made it for Richard while out in the country in The Privilege of the Sword.
Soup
Two chicken breasts, skin removed
Two carrots
1 Celery Stalk
1 Onion
1 Tbsp. dill weed
2 scallions
Salt and Pepper
Noodles:
3/4 cup flour
1 egg
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. liquid from soup pot
Salt and pepper the chicken, put into a large pot and cover with water about an inch deeper than the chicken breasts, then boil until nearly falling off the bone (about 30 minutes give or take). Reserve the liquid, but remove chicken. Remove bones, dice the chicken into bite-sized pieces and return to the pot. Dice carrots, celery and onion and add to pot, return to a boil then reduce to medium heat while making the noodles.
Combine noodle ingredients, kneading by hand toward the end. Turn out on a floured board and roll thin with a rolling pin. Turn up one edge, then roll the dough like a cinnamon roll. Cut thin strips and drop unrolled noodles into the boiling soup stock. Cover and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.
Before serving, uncover and add chopped dill weed and scallions. Stir in and allow to rest for 5 minutes before serving.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Friday, August 2, 2013
Flash Fiction Challenge - Four Random Items
No doubt about it, going through
Dad’s things after the funeral was awkward.
It was a little like rifling through another woman’s purse or reading
someone else’s journal with small revelations sprinkled throughout like herbs
in a sauce.
I was saving his guitar for the last
thing to pack. Those of us who were
closest to him knew that the guitar was the thing most precious to him. My brother and I had saved up money from
mowing lawns all summer to buy it on lay-away from a local pawn shop. It was a surprise for his birthday and he had
been almost bashful when we presented it to him like he was receiving a medal
or something. If he was going to haunt
anything it wouldn’t be the house or the garage, it would be that old Gretsch
Dorado with the birds on the pick guard.
I gathered a pocket knife with a
broken blade, some fish hooks, two ragged pieces of chamois and his old
whetstone from his night stand. There
were two more knives besides, one 2-bladed folding knife with a pearl handle
and the other a lockback with rough blackened horn. A piece of soft pine with what looked like an
elephant’s trunk and the beginnings of an ear carved into it went into the box next. There was a long metal cylinder that ended in
a flat oval with a hole through it that I recognized as a cable terminal from
his days working for McDonnell-Douglas.
He liked to use those as whistles, like blowing across the top of a
bottle, and my baby brother would definitely want those. I found two more in different sizes under a
dog-eared copy of Dune that he had
loaned to each of us kids in turn, always insisting we give it back when we
were done reading it. The last thing I
picked up was an assortment of river rocks with holes all the way through them
strung on a piece of fishing line. That
made me smile, remembering all the times he had had a whole pack of offspring,
nieces and nephews scouting the creek for holed stones.
There were a few other books on his
dresser top, including a pair of ancient Fritz Lieber books containing stories
of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser that I set aside for myself. I knew my middle brother would want the full
hardback set of Asimov’s Foundation
series. My sister might want the Avon
cologne bottles shaped like a chess piece, a drinking horn and a leaping
dolphin that were still mostly full after all these years. Mom bought them for him along with those on
the high shelves around the perimeter of their bedroom more for their esthetic
value than Dad’s need for cologne, which he only wore occasionally to
church. I was sure he’d understand if I
sold the rest on eBay. I would wrap them
in newspaper and box them separate from the things his children would want to keep.
I meant to leave his clothes to the
boys to go through. I didn’t think I
could live with myself if I rifled through Dad’s underwear drawer, and I’m sure
they would enjoy dividing up his luau shirt collection.
I slowly opened the drawer of his
night stand, not sure what to expect.
There were only three items lying in that shallow drawer. The first was the old King James Bible in a
zippered leather cover, with tabs for each book, that he had carried my whole
life. He had tied a double-row sennit to
the pull tab, and the top stops had fallen off the zipper years ago, replaced
by my careful teenaged stitching with silvery thread. Next to the Bible lay an ancient mechanical
pencil and the little black leather binder containing his song lyrics. I clutched the little notebook to my chest
and the scent of old leather drifted into my nose. He had bought it when he first joined the
Navy at age 16 so he could write down words to songs as he learned to play
them. Some of the pages were typewritten
with guitar chord names written above the double-spaced lines. Other songs were written in Dad’s hand,
easily identifiable by the Catholic “r” he favored when printing. They were not arranged in any particular
order, although he could have popped open the rings and removed them for
alphabetizing, but he seemed to be able to find any song he wanted pretty
quickly. Contained in those pages were
obscure Celtic folk songs, Spanish ballads, popular music he had heard on the
radio and lots of salty sea shanties he wouldn’t let me read until I turned 16.
I started to place the notebook in
the box with the other treasures when a small sealed envelope no bigger than a
thank-you note slipped out with my name written on the front in pencil. I sat in the old rocking chair and carefully
broke the seal, pulling out a ruled sheet of paper from the little notebook
folded in half.
“Dear Slick”, it began. “I figure it’ll be your job to get rid of my
junk when I’m gone. I don’t care much
about anything else but I do want you to give your oldest brother the Dorado
and for you to keep my Bible. But you
know this little songbook is a piece of me.
If you can find a way to do it each of you kids each need to have a copy
of this notebook. I love you and I’ll
always be with you.” It was simply
signed “Dad”.
Maybe I bumped it where it rested
against the wall or maybe Dad’s ghost did it, but just as I was folding the
note to go back in the envelope the old Dorado chimed a faint chord. That was when I finally broke down and cried,
realizing he was really gone and had known ahead of time that he was going.
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