Whenever I make this soup I wonder why I don’t eat it all the time.  It is inexpensive, healthful, delicious and quite elegant!  If you are the sort of person who keeps good home-made soup stock on hand (I am) this soup takes only a few minutes to prepare.  Aside from the soup stock the only other ingredients that absolutely requires are eggs and lemon, which I always have in my kitchen.  This soup is also a good way to make use of other stuff that you might have lying around such as leafy greens that need to eaten or leftover cooked rice (or other grains).  If you add some sautéed mushrooms to this soup, it is exactly the elegant lemony cream of mushroom soup that I was seeking when I started adding lots of lemon juice to canned cream of mushroom soup as a pre-teen.

Recently, I have become obsessed with re-creating this lemony Lebanese cauliflower dish.  I have eaten a lot of cauliflower in pursuit of this dish in the last few weeks…and it was good…but it was not THE lemony cauliflower dish.

As a by-product of this little project, I have a lot of leftover lemon marinade in my life.  It’s just lemon juice with a bit of olive oil, garlic and salt in it.  Some of this marinade has been combined with herbs to make salad dressing and some of it has gone into this soup!

I do not follow a recipe for this soup.  When I look at the various recipes that I have for it, they  are all very different from one another.  What I am trying to say if that the exact proportion of soup stock, to lemon, to egg is entirely a matter of taste and/or convenience.  That said.  I prefer to use one egg for each cup of soup stock.  I always use home-made chicken broth or chicken stock but I do believe that it would work with a good home-made vegetable stock (especially if you add a bit of miso, as Silvi suggests, for Unami).

EGG LEMON SOUP

1. Heat the broth or stock.
2. Beat the eggs together with the lemon juice.
3. Add the hot broth to the beaten egg lemon mixture in small amounts beating vigorously.
4. You can add some leftover grains, sautéed mushrooms or greens and herbs such as oregano, basil or dill if you wish!  Heat gently
5. Season with salt and pepper and additional lemon juice if you wish.