Monastery Soup and Mardi Gras

"Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood/ teach us to care, and not to care/ teach us to sit still/ even among these rocks, our peace in his will/ and even among these rocks...suffer me not to be separated/ and let my cry come unto thee." - "Ash Wednesday," T.S. Eliot

 I returned to my apartment and housemates, after a long visit with my family, to find one of them sick with the flu. Also, the area of the country where I now live is unseasonably cold, so everything just seemed to be crying out for a good, healthy pot of soup.

Thankfully, I had just brought this book back with me.

The beautiful array of soup recipes in there will not let you down. For dinner tonight, I settled on "Cherbah," a soup from the January list (it felt like January outside - that counts).

It has a beef stock base, with tomatoes, garlic, mint, pimientos and egg yolk, among other things. As my poor, flu-ridden housemate remarked, "it hits the spot."

As today is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), which marks the beginning of Lent, I decided to fry some sopaipillas for dessert (see my previous post from Sept. 2012 about these beauties). Last time I coated them with sugar, but this time my housemates and I drizzled them with honey. I also put some sliced banana on mine:

Happy Mardi Gras!