Only in York County

Of course yesterday was Mother’s Day. As much as I loved being celebrated by my husband and daughter, my favorite thing remains to celebrate my own mom. Did you know her name is also Joan? I can’t tell you how many things I still ask that Joan – even more than you guys ask me! (And many of them are food and cooking-related, much like some of today’s items.)
Thanks, Mom, for always answering my questions. I love you!

What’s inside
1. The food from Moley’s
2. Chicken-corn soup recipe
3. Working with blog comments
1. Who has the recipes for pizza and other food Moley’s of Red Lion used to serve? Did they ever open another restaurant?
– Jeff Shearer
Jeff, I’m embarrassed to say I cannot even find a reference to Moley’s in the YDR’s archives, and about the only reference to it online is that it appears in our stores and restaurants of the past directory on this blog. That doesn’t help!
You all know the drill by now, right? This means I need to ask for the help of all of our readers, whose memories might encompass much more than mine. Any suggestions for Jeff?
2. I am looking for a chicken corn soup recipe as I have recently moved to the area and my husband loves. it. Can you help? Thanks.
– Lois Shelley
Well, Lois, I’m glad you asked, because chicken-corn soup has long been a favorite topic on our Only in York County blog. (Welcome to the area, by the way!)
In addition to your chicken, chicken stock/broth and corn, a lot of people here like to include hard-boiled eggs and rivels in their soup, making it a bit heartier.
Perhaps the best recipe I’ve found comes via commenter Jo Ott. Jo says that when you cook your chicken, cook it with celery and carrots, but strain them out so that you’re left with the chicken and its stock. Then, cook that nice juice with the cooked chicken, your corn, and, if you choose, the rivels, for a bit longer.
To make the rivels, take 2 cups flour, a dash of salt and two eggs. Mix together. Make little tiny chunks – strips, round balls, or whatever you like. Then drop those into the soup. (You can actually make a good rivel soup, skipping the chicken except for the broth flavoring; see that recipe here.)
In our family – thanks in large part to my aforementioned mother – we don’t often cook with exact proportions, so for us, Jo’s recipe above would be just what we need; we’d adjust it to be as thin or as thick as we like.
Since that might not work for everyone, I did find a good recipe over on allrecipes.com that matches most of what I think we’d agree makes a good Pa. Dutch chicken-corn soup. I hope you’ll check it out here, Lois, and let us know what you think!
3. Commenters Bill Schmeer, John Loeper and Randy Shaffer let me know they’ve had some problems leaving comments on various “Yorkblog” blogs, including Only in York County.
We have heard of this happening occasionally before, but it seems to be popping up a bit more. I still haven’t been able to get the problems to happen to me, but I can offer a few suggestions based on what I’ve heard.
First, sometimes people say they didn’t think it accepted their comment, because it returned them to the original post but doesn’t show it. In those cases, most of the time, I received it. (They come to my email automatically.) On this blog, we don’t hold comments for moderation, but there is still sometimes a delay between when you hit submit and when it actually appears on the post. Come back to the entry after about a half-hour and check in a fresh browser window. In about half the cases, stuff readers thought didn’t reach us seems to appear after a slight lag. (On some other Yorkblog blogs, comments are actually held for moderation; if so, you won’t see it until the author approves it.)
Second, I’ve heard of some people hitting submit with what they said was the correct CAPTCHA (spam-filtering) code, but having it tell them there was an error. When that happens, they said, their comment has disappeared.
I don’t have an easy fix to that, but I can make one suggestion. Immediately before you hit submit, go into the body of your comment, select it all, and hit CTRL and C at the same time to copy the text. Then hit submit; if it does not work, for some reason, then you can just paste what you’ve copied into the form and try again.
Another tip, with regard to those CAPTCHAs; sometimes they’re pretty awful to see. If you get one that looks iffy, hit “refresh” on the page before you start typing your comment. Then, you’ll at least start with one you know you can read!
Finally, one last commenting tip. The field “URL” is optional – please feel free to fill it in if you have your own website or blog, but do not worry if you don’t have one. Your name and email are all you need to give, and the email just goes to me so that I can be in touch; it’s not publicized.
I can assure you we will keep looking into this; in the meantime, I hope this helps!
Got any questions? Ask Joan using the form at right. I’ll attempt to answer them in a future “Ask Joan” column on this blog. I’m already getting a big volume, so it might take me a while, but I hope to be able to answer as many as possible!