Simple Egg Drop Soup with Bok Choy

Fall means this. Flowers heavy with their most passionate colors, farmer's markets bracing beneath their golden delicious, honey crisp, gala, fuji baskets. A light that seems to be made of a million candles, leaves above and below exhaling an earthy musk. That's me with my eyes closed in the middle of the market looking as if transubstantiated. And it means soup, at last, at long last, rich broths and translucent onions. I'd envisioned an egg drop: there will definitely be garlic, and there will definitely be lemon. 

To market! My favorite? Prospect Park's Saturday market is far and away my favorite, but last week I needed a Sunday option. And a chance to explore my new haunt. (Damn That's Rye! I'm a Greenpointer now!) Turns out, McGolrick Park has a pint size market with producers that I'd yet to meet. 

As you've guessed, I settled on bok choy, though I think that this recipe would be very successful with watercress. As with most soups, there's room to play with the ingredients, but what ties the flavors together here is the herbal cruciferous, the caraway and garlic. And though grating lemon is always an extra step, extra work, it is well worth it. (Aside: I've started bartending again to keep the student loan woes at bay on Sundays. I was reminded how lemon, most incongruously, is the answer to every cocktail garnish).

(Like cocktails, soups get a garnish.)

(I love soup.)

Simple Egg Drop Soup with Bok Choy
makes 2 bowls

1 tablespoon butter
10 cloves of minced garlic
2 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
2 heads of bok hoy
1-inch knob of ginger, grated and minced
1 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon caraway
2 egg yolks
approx. 2-3 teaspoons grated lemon rind (garnish)

In a small saucepan, fry the butter and garlic on low heat until the garlic starts to loss it's white white. Add your stock to the pan, then the bok choy, ginger, pepper and caraway seeds. Cover and let simmer for ten minutes.

Quickly take the saucepan off the heat. Crack an egg, save the white elsewhere (for meringue later perhaps?) and drop the yolk, whisking immediately to incorporate. Repeat for the second.

Pour into two bowls and garnish with the lemon rind. Cheers to fall.