Trahanas

This week I wasn't feeling well so I was cooking mainly 'sicky food'. Deprived of taste and smell and with no appetite or energy to make my usual experimental dishes, I, instead, went back to my childhood memories and dug up easy to make dishes, such as chicken soup with lemon and egg sauce (kotospupa), dry bread (frigania) and a grain and milk thick soup( trahanas), simple and nutritious recipes but most important, ideal for upset stomachs and feverish colds.

Trahanas is made from a mix of cracked wheat or rye and milk and can be cooked into a soup with water , stock or milk ; could be made into a thick pie or added into other dishes instead of or with rice. There are many different variations of the basic recipe across Greece and its origins go back to ancient Greece.

My grandmother used to make each September the whole year's production, boiling the ground wheat with the sour milk, letting the mixture to cool overnight, and then spreading it in the form of small balls under the sun to dry out on a sheet for a couple of days. She would cook it into a soup with water and throw in an egg when the soup was ready.

My take was to make a chicken soup and add trahanas instead of rice.



Ingredients

150 gr trahanas
1 chicken breast ( better if I had thighs or the whole chicken)
1 carrot
1 celery
1 onion
salt and pepper
feta cheese

The idea is to boil the chicken breast with the vegetables until it's cooked, pass everything through a sieve, keep the vegetables and chicken aside and add trahanas into the water. It will take 12 minutes to be cooked. Meanwhile I melt the vegetables and shred the chicken and add everything to the trahanas soup with some feta cheese to make it more salty. Grind some pepper on top and the soup is ready.

Just to add that in the traditional chicken soup, we boil the chicken with the vegetables and the last ten minutes we add the rice. Meanwhile we whisk together the juice of one lemon with 2 eggs  till we get a smooth mix. Βefore we pour it into the hot soup we mix one cup of the warm soup water into the egg-lemon mix, then whisk to combine.