Mexican Sweetcorn Soup This week's effort contains onion, red pepper, garlic, fennel seeds, fresh thyme (from my garden), sweetcorn kernels (I used canned) and cream. The finished soup is supposed to be drizzled with chilli-flavoured oil when ready to serve but the alternative is to mix a little piquante pimenton, harissa or smoked paprika into olive oil. I'm using harissa because there's a little bit in a jar in the fridge. I chose this recipe because it links to my reference on 11th March to a Mexican sweetcorn soup in Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna . We had the soup for lunch today. The younger offspring was his usual ungallant self - he wasn't impressed. The two older males, however, liked it. "Awesome" was the word used by the older offspring. The two offspring reminisced about the cabbage, tomato and meatball soup I made in January. Verdict: "kick ass" and "it rocked." How can such a literate parent have produced those t...
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Lentil Soup Another lentil soup (see last month's blog about green lentil and lime soup) but this time it's red. Still in "What can I use up from my cupboard?" mode and entering a new and overlapping mode entitled "Yikes! How can I economise now my pay has been cut?", I came across one and a half packets of red lentils earlier in the week, thanks to the younger offspring's thorough tidying of the stores. I checked The Soup Book and came across the recipe containing red lentils, onions, celery, carrots, garlic and vegetable stock. At half past eight this morning I got up and started my preparations. The spouse had bought the required vegetable juice yesterday. The recipe options were tomato or vegetable juice and stirred by the autonomy of doing the weekly shopping unfettered by his helpmeet, he chose vegetable. What a man! The stock is vegetable and I'm using a commercial bouillon mix for the first time. Curry powder is called for but my partly Angl...
Tuscan Bean Soup This recipe calls for canned beans (borlotti, flageolet or cannellini) and as I have been tidying and cleaning out our cupboards I've used cannellini beans. I have to mention that the younger offspring has done an impressive job on the cupboards. That's enough about him. Back to me and my soup! Other ingredients include onion, carrots, leek, garlic, tomatoes, tomato puree (I substituted sun-dried tomato paste as there was an open jar of it in the fridge), chicken stock (I had to use a cube as my home-made reserves have been used up) and spinach.When ready it's served with ciabatta bread, grated Parmesan and a drizzle of olive oil. So it's quite a rich soup. We've just had the Tuscan bean soup for lunch. All enjoyed it. The adult males were particularly forthcoming in their praise. The spouse liked the "tomato-ey sharpness" and mused that ham stock should be considered as an alternative to chicken stock. Bees' Cheese and other recipes H...
This afternoon (Good Friday, 2nd April) the spouse and I strolled down the road to the next "village" to order canapes for our forthcoming party. We lingered at the book shop where we enjoyed a quiet pot of tea. I happened to notice on an adjacent bookshelf a copy of The Georgics I referred to in my blog of 16th January ( My Secret Life with Bees in Literature ). I glanced through it and saw the section in which Virgil writes about the care of bees. I hummed and hawed about whether or not to buy a copy, but didn't in the end. The birthday of someone I referred to in my blog of 6th February is coming up soon - that's why I went into the book shop: to buy a birthday card. Of course I picked out one with an illustration including a bee hive! The picture is a coloured pencil drawing of a garden by an artist called David Suff. On the card (published by Two Bad Mice - www.TwoBadMice.com) it's entitled "Beehive" , but on Suff's website it's "Seed...