Pisces Moon Studio

Yesterday for lunch I made a vegetable quiche with cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots. I used a frozen pie crust because it was easy and I had two of them in the freezer. When I ate my quiche (which was delicious, by the way), I noticed that the crust was slightly sweet. It wasn’t bad at all, it was just a trifle unexpected.

But it made me think of egg custard pie. I never bake and I eat very few sweets, but there used to be a cafeteria here in town that made terrific egg custard pie. It wasn’t terribly sweet, but it was rich and satisfying enough that a small slice would do me for weeks. Unfortunately, the cafeteria’s been gone for a number of years and I have never found another place that made good egg custard pie.

To the rescue:� The Fount of All Wisdom known as the Internet.

I searched on “recipe egg custard pie” and the first page of results turned up in excess of 400 recipes or links to recipes.� From those I narrowed down the tastes I wanted, until I arrived at this:

Two tablespoons of sugar in the whole pie� That sounds just about right, and I left out the nutmeg which the original recipe called for because I really don’t like nutmeg. This is going in the oven for dessert-after-lunch today, and I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Update: It’s good, but maybe a trifle too simple? Next time I might use brown sugar (or maple syrup) instead of white, and I suspect that most people might like it sweeter. The original baking time was way understated; after I turned the oven down to 350°, it took an additional 45 minutes instead of the 20 originally noted in the recipe.

But all in all, it’s a keeper.

Downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It’s the narrowest little place in the world, tucked into a space that was once a shared staircase between the two buildings that flank it:  Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs.

You open the door, which takes up almost the entire front of the building, and you go inside. There’s the grill and the counter on the right, the wall on the left, and just enough room for an average-size person in the middle. Behind the counter are Gus and Kathy, dispensing hot dogs and soft drinks in bottles.

My daughter knows them, and she can’t believe I’ve lived all my life here without ever having a Pete’s Famous.

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Yesterday was busier than usual. Even after the menfolk (my husband and son) arrived home, I still needed to run an errand or two. I fed them quickly, took off, did my running in the chill night air, and got back home around 8:00 pm.

I was hungry myself by that time, though not enough to make a full meal that close to bedtime. Time for one of my favorite quick comfort meals:

Photograph by Benjamin Benschneider
Seattle Times

Avgolemono (Greek Egg-and-Lemon Soup)

2 cups chicken stock*
3 tablespoons basmati rice
juice of one-half large lemon
1 large egg
Salt and pepper

In a small saucepan, bring the chicken stock to a boil.� Add the lemon juice and rice. Turn the heat down and simmer the soup for 15 minutes.

Break the egg into the soup and stir briskly with a fork or small whisk to make ribbons of scrambled egg. Season to taste, adding more lemon juice if desired. Serve immediately.

Serves two, or one who needs a lot of comforting.
323 calories, 5.1 g fat (1.6 g saturated fat) for the whole recipe.

*I always keep homemade chicken stock in the freezer, frozen in 2-cup portions. In a pinch, canned low-sodium stock (or even water and chicken bullion cubes, if sodium isn’t an issue) can be substituted, but it won’t have as much flavor.
There are many recipes for Avgolemono out there, quite a few of them more complicated than this one which I adapted from Arthur Schwartz’s Soup Suppers. If you like to tinker, you might want to check out the more complicated and more heavily seasoned recipe in The Best Recipe: Soups & Stews, by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

Bon appetit!