A Spring Dish to Bring You Back to Life
'Our traditional Easter dinner is the same every year, just like Thanksgiving, but instead of brown gravy, amber liquor and familial tension, it comes with bright green peas and lemon yellow jelly beans and an exuberant handmade bonnet pageant.
The meal itself has a tether to Greek Orthodox Easter because, by chance, over the course of my lifetime, I have inadvertently built some intimate proximities to Greece, including a time in the 1980s when I lived and worked on a small island there. As a result, on Easter Sunday, there is always lamb and always avgolemono.
This improvised avgolemono rice, as we’re calling it — in which you don’t use the whites of the egg, and you cook the rice pasta-style — started out as a respectably accurate magiritsa, the traditional Greek Easter soup that is kind of like a rice gruel made with dill and a broth of boiled lamb parts (the heart, the intestines, the liver, even the lungs) that are taken from the lambs that will be roasted for Easter. It’s the soup that breaks the Lenten fast, and that you eat when you get home from the Saturday-night vigil Mass, which can be at 3 in the morning if the bearded man in the tall black hat and the long robe, the one with the incense, takes you that far into the liturgy, which he sure as shoe leather does. At that hour, after 40 days of Lent, the soup brings you right back to life.
By incredible fortune, my restaurant, Prune, had an adjacent empty lot in the early years, where I built an ersatz pit from the yard’s rubble (cinder blocks and cobblestone, rebar and duct tape, essentially) and spit-roasted whole lambs all day on Easter Sunday in keeping with tradition. With the livers, the kidneys, the hearts and the intestines left over from those lambs, my magiritsa was formidably authentic then, even if I did serve it incorrectly as part of the great Sunday meal instead of the night before as a spare and modest “break fast.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/magazine/a-spring-dish-to-bring-you-back-to-life.html?
Avgolemono Rice
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018729-avgolemono-rice
