Well, I'm back making soup from The Soup Book. Today's recipe was for Moroccan roasted sweet potato soup. The ingredients include sweet potatoes, shallots, garlic, carrot, honey and harissa. Later on I'll be adding yoghurt and lemon juice and serving it with pitta bread. I started it off just after 11 o'clock this morning while my cleaner was here. She hadn't seen sweet potatoes before so I told her what little I thought I knew about them, that they were also called yams and originated in Central America. On checking with Wikipedia just now (yes, I know it's not a totally reliable source) I find I was wrong, that there is a difference between yams (Dioscorea batatas) and sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), the former originating in Africa and Asia, the latter orange-fleshed variety in South America. Apparently they're not even related.
Back to the soup. I had to prepare the vegetable, mix the harissa with olive oil, then having coated the vegetables with the spicy mix, roast them for 40 minutes. They smelt delicious. When cooked, I added the honey and vegetable stock (commercial cubes again) before giving them a whizz in the food processor. At that stage the soup tasted very promising, even though I got that slightly cloying taste of sweet potato that can be a little off-putting. This will dinner for myself and the off-spring tonight - the spouse will be elsewhere.
Minor Celeb Spot
It's two weeks since I saw RTE's Anne Cassin at Dublin airport. Yesterday afternoon, en route to collect the younger off-spring, I drove by the national broadcaster's Anne Doyle on Belgrave Square, Rathmines. I saw her a few years ago in the Swan Centre!
Hitler and the 30kph Speed Limit in Dublin
I saw this link today in the Irish Times weekend magazine - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWCLlMzX-dA. It involves that much parodied scene from the film Downfall. In this version Hitler is told about the 30kph speed limit in the city centre. One of the better parodies, but still doesn't top the one about when he learns Michael Jackson is dead.
What about bees?
Of course I'm going to mention bees! There's a little honey in today's soup! A book that has caught my eye recently is A World without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum. It seems to accord with the documentary Colony and other books - that the number of bees is declining alarmingly and that there will be dire consequences.
Back to the soup. I had to prepare the vegetable, mix the harissa with olive oil, then having coated the vegetables with the spicy mix, roast them for 40 minutes. They smelt delicious. When cooked, I added the honey and vegetable stock (commercial cubes again) before giving them a whizz in the food processor. At that stage the soup tasted very promising, even though I got that slightly cloying taste of sweet potato that can be a little off-putting. This will dinner for myself and the off-spring tonight - the spouse will be elsewhere.
Minor Celeb Spot
It's two weeks since I saw RTE's Anne Cassin at Dublin airport. Yesterday afternoon, en route to collect the younger off-spring, I drove by the national broadcaster's Anne Doyle on Belgrave Square, Rathmines. I saw her a few years ago in the Swan Centre!
Hitler and the 30kph Speed Limit in Dublin
I saw this link today in the Irish Times weekend magazine - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWCLlMzX-dA. It involves that much parodied scene from the film Downfall. In this version Hitler is told about the 30kph speed limit in the city centre. One of the better parodies, but still doesn't top the one about when he learns Michael Jackson is dead.
What about bees?
Of course I'm going to mention bees! There's a little honey in today's soup! A book that has caught my eye recently is A World without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum. It seems to accord with the documentary Colony and other books - that the number of bees is declining alarmingly and that there will be dire consequences.
Comments
Post a Comment